Halfway to Halloween and Summerween
Later ran At Home's year-round Halloween creator program across four platforms with eight influencers, producing 85 pieces of content and 1.4M total organic impressions.
Case in 60 seconds
At Home sells Halloween decor into a category with a narrow autumn selling window, so building awareness for new product releases from May onward meant reaching customers months before the season the products belong to.
The campaign appears to turn on the fact that At Home's Halloween customers already celebrate the season year-round through invented occasions such as Valloween and Creepmas, so an off-season activation reads as meeting an existing habit rather than manufacturing one.
Rather than dictating creative, At Home treated its creator partners as customers who understand the spooky community, giving them ownership of format and direction so the content would read as genuine to the audiences it was made for.
Running May through August 2025, Later's Services team managed vetting, concept planning, execution and tracking across Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube Shorts and TikTok, while At Home approved creators and content through the Later Influence platform. Creators chose their own SKUs and built Halloween transformations around moments including Halfway to Halloween, Summerween and 100 Days Until Halloween, alongside a giveaway and a one-week turnaround partnership.
Later reports 8 Influencers, 85 Total Pieces of Content and 1.4M Total Organic Impressions, a 7.5% Average Engagement Rate against 2.2% for the July 2024 Halloween campaign, 99.9% Positive/Neutral Comment Sentiment, and 7.3M Paid Impressions with 3.38M engagements and 302K link clicks.
Strategy Breakdown
The primary strategy-learning section — interpretation, not a press-release summary.
Creative & Execution System
Assets & channels
- TikTok
- YouTube
Partners
- Later (lead_agency)
Participation mechanic
- A giveaway run with @flashesofstyle that the page reports drew over 5,400 entries and 1,000+ new followers, alongside comment-level participation from the spooky community around creator posts.
Creator role
- Bonnie Barton — creator
Results & Evidence
| Metric | Value | Result type |
|---|---|---|
| Pinterest average engagement rate | creators on Pinterest achieved an average engagement rate of 23.53% | engagement_rate |
| average engagement rate | 7.5% Average Engagement Rate (vs. July 2024 Halloween campaign of 2.2%) | engagement_rate |
| cost per follower and cost per entry | with a cost per follower at $5.97 and a cost per entry at $1.10 | follower_growth |
| impressions and engagement rate for @flashesofstyle content | Her content generated over 187K impressions with a 7.3% engagement rate. | engagement_rate |
| impressions, engagements and engagement rate for @spoooky.ash partnership | driving 42K impressions and 2.5K engagements with a 6% engagement rate | engagement_rate |
| influencers | 8 Influencers | creators_count |
| new followers from giveaway | driving 1,000+ new followers and over 5,400 entries | follower_growth |
| paid impressions | 7.3M Paid Impressions (with 3.38M engagements, plus 302K link clicks) | impressions |
| pieces of content | 85 Total Pieces of Content | content_pieces |
| positive/neutral comment sentiment | 99.9% Positive/Neutral Comment Sentiment | performance |
| total organic impressions | 1.4M Total Organic Impressions (58% of the 2.4M total impressions across all At Home campaigns, May - July 2025) | performance |
Why Later's strategy worked
- 1
Handing creators control of format and SKU selection appears to work best where the creators are existing customers of the brand, because the taste that makes their content credible is the same taste that guided their product choices.
- 2
Testing platforms outside the brand's established habit paid off here, since Pinterest creators reached an average engagement rate of 23.53% and Pinterest and YouTube Shorts content outperformed the business-as-usual paid assets running beside it.
- 3
Speed inside a live cultural moment is a usable capability rather than luck, because At Home moved from invitation to live content within one week when a competitor's crediting dispute made a specific creator the centre of community attention.
- 4
Off-season activation reads as a way to lengthen a seasonal category's selling window, since the May Halfway to Halloween campaign drew 1,000+ new followers and over 5,400 entries at a cost per follower of $5.97.
- 5
A single strong partnership appears to compound beyond its campaign window, because the creator behind the giveaway went on to become an At Home ambassador partner and her content was repurposed across owned channels.