Spencer Gifts: From Mail-Order Catalog to Mall Anchor

Oct 13, 2026 / Oct 13, 2026 · 7 min read · spencer-gifts brand-history mail-order-catalog mall-retail novelty-gifts spirit-halloween hot-topic retail-history direct-marketing max-adler ·

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A Catalog That Started With Eight Novelty Items

Max Spencer Adler was flying as a bomber crewman in World War II when he was shot down over Hungary and imprisoned by the Nazis. Back home, The Hustle's history of the company recounts, he expected a postwar boom and wanted to open a gift shop, but investors weren't convinced. So in 1947 he started alone, selling eight novelty gifts through a mail-order catalog because he couldn't afford a storefront. He called it Spencer Gifts because the name "sounded good." Nearly eighty years later the company, now known simply as Spencer's, owns one of its longtime mall rivals.

The early catalog sold things nobody needed and plenty of people wanted. For its first three years it earned less than $300,000 in sales, but by the late 1950s it had become, in The Hustle's phrase, "the Sears catalog's cool younger brother." In 1958 the company mailed 12 million catalogs, enough for about one of every four American households. They carried 2,000 items, among them singing teacups, stuffed dog radios, expandable bookshelves and mattress fresheners, priced from 29 cents to $300, and the year's sales came to $7.5 million, about $83 million in today's money. Most orders were packed at a 70,000-square-foot New Jersey warehouse.

The strangest line was alive. Spencer's imported burros from Mexico and sold them as the new trend in household pets, and Mental Floss's history of the brand notes that LIFE magazine covered the fad in 1954, reporting $85 burros moving at a clip of 40 a day and observing that, "except for stubbornness," they were "very placid."

From a Mail-Order Catalog to a Mall Chain

The First Store, and the Buyer It Attracted

The company did not open a physical store until 1963, at the Cherry Hill Mall in New Jersey, not far from its headquarters. That store's success drew the attention of the Music Corporation of America, better known as MCA, which bought Spencer's from Adler in 1967. Under MCA the chain went from 30 stores and $17 million in sales to around 550 stores and $300 million in annual revenue by the late 1980s, riding the boom in enclosed malls across the country through the 1970s and 1980s.

Brick-and-mortar retail suited the merchandise. The catalog that had built the company was discontinued in 1990, and from then on Spencer's was a store chain. Ownership kept changing above it: Forbes's company profile records that the company was formerly a unit of Vivendi Universal Entertainment and was sold to the investment firm GB Palladin in 2003, and The Hustle describes it today as privately owned after a buyout led by a private equity firm. Its CEO, Steven Silverstein, told The Hustle that nostalgia has always been a theme behind the merchandise that sells.

What Sold on the Shelves

The stores kept the catalog's habit of chasing whatever was in the air. Mental Floss describes how a revival of interest in Rubik's Cubes and in the 1983 Al Pacino film Scarface met on Spencer's shelves as stacks of Scarface-themed Rubik's Cubes. The Hustle's reporter found a miniature figurine of the "Scream" mask, rock-band T-shirts and, inevitably, lava lamps. "Lava lamps are iconic to us," Silverstein said. Top sellers in recent years have included novelty Christmas sweaters and band T-shirts, a mix that leans on nostalgia as much as on shock value.

A Catalog Business That Drew the FTC

Spencer's irreverent product pitches occasionally went further than regulators would accept. Mental Floss recounts that the Reduce-Eze girdle, which promised to shave inches off the wearer's stomach, caught the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, which took the company to task for advertising that the device could reduce body weight without exercise. The FTC also faulted Spencer's for implying that its jewelry contained precious metals. The claims that made the catalog copy memorable were the same claims that brought the scrutiny.

Spirit Halloween: The Seasonal Business Beside the Stores

Spencer's also owns Spirit Halloween, the seasonal costume chain that, The Hustle notes, has thrived by finding cheap, vacant retail spaces. Mental Floss reported in 2017 that, despite being open only two months of the year, Spirit locations contributed roughly half of Spencer's $250 million in annual revenue. The most recent figure Spencer's had shared with The Hustle for the combined business was $500 million in 2006; the company does not publish its financials, which makes its current health hard to gauge from outside.

The seasonal model rhymes with the original catalog. Both go to the customer at the moment demand peaks, one through a mailbox in the 1950s, the other through an empty storefront each fall.

Surviving the Retail Apocalypse

Enclosed malls have shrunk sharply since their peak. Nick Egelanian, founder of the retail consulting firm SiteWorks, told The Hustle that perhaps as many as 3,000 malls existed in the 1980s, and he estimates about 600 to 700 indoor malls remain in the US, a decline of nearly 70%. Discounters and "category killers" such as Best Buy, Barnes & Noble and Home Depot took the department stores' trade, and the specialty stores that depended on department-store traffic went with them. At Oak Park Mall in Overland Park, Kansas, just five of the more than 100 specialty stores open in 1980 survive.

Spencer's, Hot Topic and Claire's are among the exceptions. Egelanian's explanation is that, together with the mall, they sell an experience to a particular age group rather than a category of goods a big-box store can undercut. Silverstein put it in terms of growing up: "There's a coming of age story that's part of [Spencer's]." The back of the store, with its adult novelties, has become its own genre of teenage video. "Apparently those who go in never make it out," one teen joked in a clip viewed millions of times. The same edge has drawn trouble too: The Hustle notes that South Dakota police once accused a store of operating an unlicensed adult-oriented business and seized 2,000 items.

The store count, which The Hustle says was reported as high as 700 in the early 2000s, has outlasted most of the malls the chain opened into, and Spencer's has more stores now than it did in the late 1980s even as the number of malls has fallen.

Buying a Rival Instead of Outlasting It

On August 6, 2026, Spencer Spirit Holdings announced a definitive agreement to buy Hot Topic, Inc. and its brands, Hot Topic, BoxLunch and Her Universe, from the private equity firm Sycamore Partners, according to the company's announcement. The deal brought six retail concepts under one parent, Spencer's, Spirit Halloween and Spirit Christmas on one side and the three Hot Topic brands on the other, with a combined footprint of more than 3,000 stores across North America. Retail Dive reported that financial terms were not disclosed and that Sycamore had bought Hot Topic in 2013.

The purchase closed on September 2, 2026. Hot Topic, BoxLunch and Her Universe continue to operate independently of the Spencer Spirit business from their existing California headquarters, and Hot Topic's chief executive, Steve Vranes, now reports to Silverstein.

The company that began as one veteran's eight-item mail-order catalog now owns a large share of the mall's teen retail. Its catalog ended in 1990, but the instinct behind it, finding a narrow audience and selling to it directly, carried into the stores, into Spirit's seasonal storefronts, and now into a rival that courts the same shopper.