Texas woman charges up to $2,000 to decorate people’s porches with pumpkins — and her business is thriving

“I think being in an area where no one else was really offering this helped,” Hazelett, 37, told Moneywise. “There was a gap in the market and instead of overthinking whether there was enough demand, I decided to try it and find out.”

Hazelett, who describes herself as “a stay-at-home mom” with no business background, launched Porch In Season with the tagline “Seasonal style, delivered” and the promise to turn your porch into a pumpkin paradise for anywhere from $200 to around $1,200 — though she told People that her most expensive commission cost $2,000.

And now, Porch In Season, which Hazelett runs with her husband, is part of a burgeoning national offering of holiday decorators catering to autumn/Halloween and Christmas-lovers.

Making a bid for your decor dollars

Hazelett believes that the allure of businesses like hers is largely that “we’re selling convenience just as much as we’re selling pumpkins.”

That includes the time commitment it takes to create the displays, from sourcing the right pumpkin varieties to transporting, cleaning and arranging them — and then cleaning up.

“We take all of that off the customer’s plate.”

Fellow Texan, Heather Torres, whose Porch Pumpkins business inspired Hazelett, proved so successful that she branched off into coaching to help others launch their own pumpkin practice.

And that’s no surprise, as decor is big business. The National Retail Federation estimated that Halloween consumer spending will hit $13.5 billion in 2026, with a whopping $4.3 billion spent on decorations alone. While 2026 Christmas spending estimates aren’t available, one survey found that consumer holiday budgets are up nearly 10% this year, with decor among the spending items on the rise.

Meanwhile, a quick Google search of “porch decorators” for Halloween and Christmas yields a slew of services happy to share a piece of that (pumpkin) pie.

In Los Angeles, Dr. Halloween decorates homes with elaborately ghoulish decor before transforming into Dr. Christmas for the holiday season, offering festive trimmings inside and outside of the house for anywhere between $5,000 and $50,000.

Christmas decor services can also range from between roughly $2,000 and $4,500 in Pittsburgh and Chicago to up to $30,000 in Philadelphia.

Hazelett, meanwhile, admits that there’s “been a huge learning curve for me” in terms of running her own business. She pointed to logistics — figuring out how many pumpkins to order and how to transport, store and deliver them, as well as learning about pricing for the actual service she provides beyond buying pumpkins.

“It’s very easy when you’re starting a business to undervalue your own time because you’re just excited that someone wants to pay you at all,” she added.

Along with the porch design, she noted in People that she removes the pumpkins at the end of the season for farmers to use them as feed.

And while Hazelett admits that she’d love to see her business become “a seasonal decorating company rather than only a pumpkin porch company,” she’s not looking to expand for the sake of it.

“I genuinely love pumpkins and fall decorating, so this wasn’t just a business opportunity I picked out of nowhere,” she explained. “If we add other services, I want them to feel like a natural extension of the brand and be something I’m genuinely excited to create.”

From side-hustle to small business

As for others making the jump from side-hustle to small business, Hazelett advises to “start before you feel completely ready, because I’m not sure that feeling ever actually comes.”

She noted that if she’d spent a year “trying to have every detail figured out before launching,” she “probably would have talked myself out of it somewhere along the way.”

That said, she emphasized the importance of keeping on top of expenses and sales and how much time you spend on the job and suggested avoiding comparisons of your new business to established ones. It’s also important, she added, that you “don’t assume that being busy automatically means you’re profitable.”