Online retailer Costume Craze LLC ships more than 100,000 packages worldwide from its Lindon warehouse annually. But its error rate is a marginal 0.02 percent.

Its secret? Posting their error-prone workers' mistakes on the company's Wall of Shame.

"Our packers are the last line of defense against an emotionally unhappy customer. If we make a mistake and mess up their costume, it ruins their event. That's why accuracy is so important," said Kathryn Maloney, one of three co-owners of Lindon-based Costume Craze. "If a packer makes one mistake, he's on probation. If he makes two mistakes, he's demoted to picker."

Even though the worker won't suffer a paycut, the prospect of being teased by fellow workers when packing slip errors are posted on the warehouse wall is enough to make any packer scrupulously careful, said Maloney, a business management and entrepreneurship graduate with Brigham Young University.

To expedite order management, customers can now type in their orders and credit card information on the company's encrypted Web site at costumecraze.com, and the order is automatically processed. "In the past, workers would pick up the costume, pack it, and type out the packing slip order by hand and then paste it on the package. But with the volume of orders we handle today, that wouldn't be practical," Kathryn said.

Founded in September 2001, the family-owned business has made MountainWest Venture Group's list of fastest-growing companies in the state for the past two years. Costume Craze's annual sales jumped to $3.7 million in 2005 from a mere $17,000 in 2002. Sales this year are projected to hit $5 million.

Not bad for a business that started as an experiment for a search engine optimization software that Kathryn's brother, Matthew, created to help online retailers' Web sites show up in the Top 10 listings on popular search engines such as Yahoo! or Google.

"I tested my software by selling monk robes, and found there were more people searching for monks' robes than selling it. That showed there was a market," Matthew said. "We had planned to sell the software to Internet retailers, or companies like IBM or Novell. But when the robes' sales started to take off on their own, we dropped the idea."

That proved a good move.

In 2005, Americans spent nearly $3.3 billion on Halloween merchandise, snatching up candy, costumes, home decorations, pumpkins and other products, according to the National Retail Federation. That number is expected to rise to nearly $5 billion this year.

Costume Craze hopes to grab a share of that business since Halloween is typically its busiest period and costume orders begin as early as July and continue through October. That's followed by the company's second busiest period in November and December as shoppers gear up for Christmas, and then the Jewish Feast of Purim and other holiday celebrations from January through March, said Kathleen, the Maloney siblings' mother and Costume Craze's co-owner.

But the company's growth hasn't been easy and being an entrepreneur meant making a lot of sacrifice, Kathryn said. "We didn't pay ourselves for four years. Every penny we earned went back to buying inventory and growing the company."

Today, the company's 20,000-square-foot warehouse stores more than 225,000 costumes and accessories for year-round holidays ranging from Mardi Gras to St. Patrick's Day, birthdays, themed parties and theater productions. Its costumes for adults, children and even dogs cost between $9.99 and $1,000, while its accessories retail for as low as 99 cents to as high as $1,000.

About 85 percent of its customers are from the United States, and the remaining 15 percent from other countries including Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong.

Costume Craze buys most of its costumes from manufacturers such as Rubies Costume Co. of New York, which makes about 80 percent of the world's supply of party, holiday and theater costumes.

"Hollywood drives a lot of the customers' costume choices. This year, for instance, the hot costumes are from the Superman, Pirates of the Caribbean II, Star Wars and Harry Potter movies. Next year, it'll most likely be a huge Spiderman year because of the new Spiderman movie coming out in the summer of 2007," Kathleen said.

"We have to start buying our costumes in January. We usually base the number of costumes we buy for the year on the previous year's sales of popular costumes," she said. For girls, princess and fairy costumes remain hot picks, while boys prefer pirate costumes, she said.

Despite intense competition from other online retailers such as anniescostumes.com and buycostumes.com, Costume Craze says it is able to keep its costume prices competitive because its full-time work force is small and because it can advertise on search engines for free.

"Most Web sites don't get indexed by Google or other search engines because of the way they're written. Our software is a publishing mechanism that makes it possible for Google to see our entire Web site, and get it in the Top 10 listings," Kathryn said.

Despite being one of Utah's fastest growing companies and having an Internet presence, many Utahns are still unaware of the company because it doesn't have any bricks-and-mortar stores, she said. To raise its profile in the community, the company is sponsoring local events such as the ongoing Cornbelly's Corn Maze & Pumpkin Fest at Thanksgiving Point and the Freedom Festival in Provo.

"Our target demographic is a regular computer user, so it doesn't make sense to advertise on a billboard," she said.

The company is now ramping up its work force for Halloween and Christmas, hiring up to 20 more temporary warehouse workers and 10 more call center workers during the next few weeks.

"Our challenge now is finding and training enough temporary workers to work in the warehouse and customer service center," Kathryn said. Because of its strong year-on-year growth, the company is also looking to expand in the Lindon area and possibly buying its own property for a larger warehouse.