A Miami costume shop holds the key to your secret identity. Take a look inside
At a quaint and crowded shop in Little Havana, it’s tough to know what time of year it is.
In January, it’s Halloween. In July, it’s Halloween.
And now that it’s October?
It’s definitely Halloween.
At La Casa de los Trucos, rows of superhero masks including Spider-Man hang next to lucha libre masks worn by Mexican wrestlers like Rey Mysterio. A narrow walkway snakes throughout the packed store, between stacks of costumes on both sides.
A Star Wars storm trooper costume hangs on one side, a few inches away from a Harry Potter costume set. The store is so jammed with merch that you have to talk to employees and other customers — because there’s no way around them.
And that’s just how Jorge Torres likes it.
Now in his 50s, Torres has been the manager of the La Casa de los Trucos, “The House of Tricks,” costume shop in Little Havana since 2007. And he enjoys the store just as much as he did when he was a kid.
His mother, Carmen Torres, still owns the business.
“It’s a fun business,” he said. “There’s a lot of stuff here that is unique to the store. We have exploding items that nobody else sells, but we also sell costumes including our own exclusive costumes.”
How the costume shop started
Torres’ late father, Esteban, and mom, Carmen, opened the shop in 1972 after they both emigrated from Cuba to Miami. Esteban owned a costume shop in Cuba before he sought refuge in the United States, where he later met and married Carmen. Torres affectionately refers to his mother — who rings people up at La Casa — as La Jefa, “the boss.”
Customers spend an average of $30 to $40 on costumes and $10 to $20 on joke or gag items, like a doughnut with a roach attached to the bottom, or a fake car fob that shocks the hand.
The shop has a team of 10 employees, and seasonal hires join them during the busy Halloween season. The store is open seven days a week to meet the holiday demand.
Demands of the business
Torres says there are challenges that come with managing a business like this through the year. Sure, Halloween makes October busy, but the store still has to survive the other 11 months of the year. But dressing up can be a year-round affair, like when moms and dads are looking for party costumes or cultural outfits for their kids.
“It’s very tough, but we keep busy because it’s a year round operation,” he said.
Each year, it’s the day after Halloween that holds a special significance, Torres said. He and his team begin doing inventory every Nov. 1, right after Halloween, a process that takes months.
“That’s because we have over 15,000 styles of costumes,” he said. “But that’s just costumes. The rest is other things like wigs and makeup.”
He said professional makeup artists visit La Casa because they can find high quality and hypoallergenic makeup that won’t make the wearers sick.
“They can get rashes,” Torres said. “We bring in the professional makeup and we always tell people this makeup was recommended by clowns. And they laugh.”
Although La Casa de los Trucos has had decades of success, it still faces the same reality as other stores.
Consumer trends post-COVID have changed how people shop even more. National retailer Party City shut down all of its locations in February 2025 after nearly having 1,000 stores at one point. Party City’s 20 South Florida stores had become go-to locations for local shoppers.
Many consumers who regularly went to brick-and-mortar stores now shop mostly online.
Then there are those seasonal pop-up shops that seem to be in every vacant shopping center storefront in South Florida, selling costumes and masks for Halloween. But Torres doesn’t consider them competition.
“People here know us and know that we’re local,” he said. “We pay taxes and those pop-ups don’t. We know people understand that we hire local and are here year round. We look at those places as stores trying to cash in on small mom and pops. They don’t have the selection that we do.”
But the business has retrenched recently. By 2002, Casa de los Trucos had seven locations throughout South Florida and recently downsized to the original Calle Ocho location to make things more manageable for the Torres family.
Calle Ocho’s emergence as a tourist destination has made the shop’s location appealing to potential buyers, but Torres has turned down several offers and says he has no intention of selling the business right now.
Generations of customers
Torres takes pride in seeing parents who visited as kids digging through costumes and masks at La Casa de los Trucos as they return with their own children to shop.
“It’s very humbling and very cool to see people that come in here,” he said. “We’re getting to the point now where customers came here as kids, and now they’re bringing their grandkids.”
Coconut Grove yacht broker Gio Tummolillo has shopped at La Casa since he was in elementary school.
“It’s just that you don’t have this experience anymore,” Tummolillo, 40, said. “There’s no more tangible, physical places you can visit and pick something out and try it on. And it’s what kids do.”
Tummolillo’s mother used to bring him to the shop as a child, and he wistfully remembers finding a costume of his favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, Raphael. Now that he’s a father, he brings his daughter to Las Trucos to shop for costumes.
As Torres stood behind a glass counter and helped sort through costumes and masks, he talked about the Netflix anime Demon Slayer, a program that has kids rushing to La Casa for their costumes.
What’s popular is often “governed by what’s on TV or movies,” he said. “Demon Hunters is the number one costume this year for kids. Everybody asks for it. Everybody wants it.”
With no hesitation, Torres predicted next Halloween’s big trend based on a recent movie release — the Super Mario Bros. of Nintendo video game fame.
“We have all the styles,” he said.
Torres and his team will be prepared.
If you go
What: La Casa de los Trucos
Where: 1343 SW Eighth St., Miami
Hours: 10 a.m.-8 p.m., seven days
This story was originally published October 9, 2025 at 8:34 AM.
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