Ben Cooper (company)

Founder Ben Cooper was born on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1906. Cooper designed costumes and sets for the legendary Cotton Club in Harlem and several editions of the Ziegfeld Follies. The two companies formally merged and incorporated as Ben Cooper, Inc., on December 8, 1942. By the late 1940s, Ben Cooper, Inc. was one of the largest and most prominent Halloween costume manufacturers in the United States. Its costumes were generally very thin fabric with a silk-screened image on the front that sold for less than $3. The company began selling its costumes through large retailers such as J. C. Penney, Sears, Woolworth's, and five-and-dime stores. The company became known for licensing popular film and television characters and getting their images onto store shelves quickly. The company also licensed the Batman character in 1964. The company was the first to license anything depicting Marvel superheroes. The company produced a very popular Richard Nixon mask in the late 1960s, which sold as equally well as its Ronald Reagan mask even in the late 1980s. The company produced a George H. W. Bush mask in 1987, anticipating Bush's election as president by a year. Despite this setback, in 1984 the firm was still the largest supplier of Halloween costumes in the United States. The company recovered around 1987, as total sales of accessories, costumes, and makeup rose at an annual rate of 20 percent a year. A 2024 documentary by Rob Caprilozzi, Dressing Up Halloween: The Story of Ben Cooper, Inc. traces the firm's corporate history. In it, the son of costume designer Frank Romano, states that the reason that the costumes had an image of the character on the front was that children often moved the sweat-inducing masks off their faces and wore them atop their heads and the licensing agreements required that the characters always be recognizable. ==Toys==

Apart from Halloween costumes, Ben Cooper's other major venture was toys, primarily of the rack toy variety. In 1974, they made Planet of the Apes jigglers, sold loose in a counter box. In 1975, they made Shark!, a rubber shark with a rubber man clearly inspired by the popularity of Jaws, for which Imperial Toy Corporation had the actual license. In 1980, they produced a set of "Marvel Super Heroes Action Figures," which were also flexible, non-articulated "jigglers," depicting Spider-Man, The Thing, Doctor Strange, and the evil Red Skull, the latter two possibly appearing as toys for the first time. They were sold loose from a counter display box. ==Bankruptcies and sale==

The increasing sales in the late 1980s were not enough to stave off bankruptcy, however. Ben Cooper, Inc.'s financial problems became so severe in 1988 that many customers left the firm and diverted licenses and business to its biggest competitor, Collegeville. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 13, 1988. As a privately held company, little financial data was available on its profit margins. However, one press report estimated the firm's profit margin below 10 percent in 1989. Cooper's two insurance companies canceled coverage of the firm and refused to pay, citing inaccuracies in the insurance policy. The bankruptcy court refused to consider Cooper's claims against the insurance companies. Cooper appealed the court's ruling. One of the insurance companies appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals considered the jurisdictional issue, found in Cooper's favor, and reinstated its original ruling in January 1991. Just days after the appellate court's second ruling, executives of Ben Cooper, Inc. announced they were moving the company to Greensboro, North Carolina. The company said at this time that it had 35 permanent employees, and manufactured and supplied more than 4 million costumes in the previous year. It said it controlled 70 to 80 percent of the licensed costume character costume business, and was partnered with companies such as Children's Television Workshop (producers of Sesame Street), DC Comics, Mattel, and Walt Disney Studios. ==Collectibility==

Products made by Ben Cooper, Inc. remain highly collectible. Collectors prize the boxed costumes with mask the most. In 2002, photographer Phyllis Galembo published Dressed for Thrills: 100 Years of Halloween Costumes & Masquerade, a book of text and photography which features some of the costumes produced by Ben Cooper, Inc. ==Footnotes==