A few days ago, my kids were giggling together in the living room as I cleaned up breakfast. My two-year-old daughter came toddling into the kitchen signing “help” and pointing at my son. At almost six years old, my son could easily manipulate the fastener on the cape draped over his shoulders. He was grinning at me with his bright blue eyes sparkling through his partial mask. Little sister wanted to be a superhero just like her brother.

As I dressed her as Captain America, it struck me that almost two years ago I decided to buy an extra cape from our superhero cape adoption fundraiser so they could each have one. Though I hadn’t met her, and didn’t even know what child would end up in our family at the time, I’m so glad I did. Our first adoption fundraiser had just come full circle.

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After we announced that we were adopting from China, my husband and I discussed different things we could do to afford adoption. While I naively thought that we would get enough grants to cover all of it, we picked a few fundraiser ideas and put together a loose schedule of when we would run them to avoid overextending our friends and family (you can read how we raised all the money here). First on the list was selling superhero capes and masks.

While we planned to do the traditional yard sale and t-shirt fundraisers at some point, I loved the idea of selling the capes because it was something I would want to buy for my own child. Many of my friends had young children who were in the age to play dress up, and it was getting close to Halloween season. Since Superman himself was adopted by the Kent family, this fundraiser was perfect for our cause!

Our profit from selling the capes was $547.50! Considering I didn’t have to do much beyond promotion, keeping track of orders, and collecting money, we were ecstatic with the results! I highly recommend this as a fundraiser if you are in the process of adopting. And to make it more successful, I’ve provided a few tips just for my readers.

Choose the right superhero cape supplier for your adoption fundraiser.

There are several ways to get capes to sell, making it easy to find an option that works for your family. We sold capes for $20, masks for $5, and did $5 flat rate shipping. You can decide what price point works for you, but this worked well for us.

If you are crafty (or have crafty people at your disposal), you may choose to make superhero capes yourself. I found this pattern on Amazon for less than $10. Though I haven’t done the math on fabric, my guess is that this may give you the greatest profit margin. However, it will take the most work. Be sure to calculate how much your time is worth before committing to this.

Many people choose to buy bulk capes and sell from their own inventory. You can buy the capes on Amazon for less than $6 each and mark them up for a profit. (I found this option for printed capes with masks, another one for a printed mask/cape combo, and this one for blank capes and masks.) This is a good option if you have the time to ship them and want to front the cost of buying capes. Be aware that some are more popular than others, so you may end up with capes you can’t sell.

I didn’t have a lot of extra time on my hands and wanted to make the logistics as simple as possible. So we took orders and payments and let another adoptive mom do the work for us. I was connected with a lady who started selling the capes in 2013 to help fund her own adoption. Her family sold over 500 capes, profiting more than $5,000! For a while after, she helped other families do this superhero cape adoption fundraiser. I do not believe that she is providing this service anymore, so I’m looking for someone else to recommend. If you know someone, please email me! Providing this option is also a good way to raise money on the side even after your adoption is complete. 

Families have made $20-$4,500 on this fundraiser in the past, depending on how big their network is. I loved that it didn’t cost me anything to run this superhero cape adoption fundraiser, and I didn’t have to worry about getting the capes together or shipping because I went through a third party.

If you go this route, you sell capes by collecting orders, payments, and shipping addresses. I used an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of everything.

Pick the best timing for more sales.

As I mentioned before, the superhero cape adoption fundraiser was our first major attempt to raise money. We announced publicly that we were adopting on July 4 on social media. At that point we had completed our home study and sent our dossier to China, but had not been matched with a child.

Shortly after this, we decided to sell the capes but choose to wait a little closer to Halloween to announce the fundraiser. Though kids who like to play dress up could use these any time of the year, we thought people would be more likely to purchase them as costumes for October parties and trick-or-treating. I wanted to take orders for around two weeks, and needed to allow 2-3 weeks shipping time from my third-party vendor.

With this timeline in mind, we ran the fundraiser from September 1-16. I took a day or two to collect any straggling payments and put the order list together. People got their capes in the mail the first week of October.

If you wanted to try a similar timeline, make sure to buy your capes, make them, or arrange things way in advance. Demand goes up for everyone as you get close to October, so prices may be affected or backorders could occur.

Before Halloween worked well for us, but it isn’t the only option. November may work well for people buying Christmas gifts.  Prior to Easter could be good timing if you advertise it as a basket filler. If your town has any type of superhero 5K, parade, party, or event, these may sell well in advance of that occasion. Or there could be another great time depending on your situation. I’d love to hear what worked for people in the comments below!

Another thing to keep in mind for this and all fundraisers is that you can’t bombard your network with fundraiser after fundraiser and expect large returns on all of them. If you are counting on the same people to buy things over and over, make sure to spread out requests to avoid donor fatigue.

Kids love to dress up in super hero capes, giving this adoption fundraiser mass appeal.

Advertise your superhero cape adoption fundraiser to multiple audiences.

Most of our sales came from family and friends, but lots of people I had never met purchased these capes because they are cute. My primary advertising was on Facebook and included photos and all the details necessary for someone to put in an order. I made sure my posts were public so that they could be shared by my friends.

This worked great and I even had people organizing group costumes for their kids on social media, which required multiple parents to buy corresponding capes! I also shared it on some mom groups and yard sale postings on Facebook.

I wasn’t really active on Instagram at the time, but you can definitely use cape photos to advertise on there as well. Any social media outlet that you have a following can be utilized. Our neighborhood is a part of the Nextdoor network, so I shared it there as well.

Then think about any other audiences who may be interested. This is a fundraiser that is better geared toward people who buy for young children than it is to general adoption supporters. Do you have a church that will let you share it with the congregation? Can you email info out to your office? Is there a daycare or school bulletin board you could put a flyer on? If you get creative, I’m sure you can find multiple places to get the word out.

Be firm on payment.

I’ll admit that collecting money from people is a little awkward. When you don’t have a brick and mortar store where people exchange money with you for a product on site, you tend to get promises of payment that don’t materialize. Because I went through a third party, I was paying her for her portion of capes plus shipping up front. After the order was placed, she shipped them out. This meant I had to have the money or risk paying for them myself.

To make the collection process as easy as possible, I told people they could send money to me using my PayPal email address. I tried to avoid sending PayPal invoices because a processing fee was taken out for those. Now, I would offer Venmo as an option. People could also mail me a check or cash. I kept a spreadsheet to document the name, address, amount the person owed, amount I owed to my supplier, status of payment, their order, and the amount I would profit. This kept me organized so I didn’t miss anything.

My strong recommendation is not to place an order for anyone you have not received money from. Even if they are your closest friend, grandmother, or next door neighbor. You are funding an adoption, not running a credit service. If you give people multiple payment options and a reasonable amount of time, there should not be any reason not to pay you.

Let’s say you sell 50 capes, which would turn a $500 profit for you. Not bad! Your cousin Sally wants three sets and owes you $65, including shipping. You’ve known her your whole life, so you’re sure she won’t let you down. And a lady at your office has organized a group costume for her daughter and nine friends so she’s putting in the order for them together, owing you $205 with shipping. She says she has half the money together and will get the rest of it at her kid’s soccer game this weekend so she’d rather just pay everything at the same time.

But you need to place the order and don’t want to miss out on these 13 cape sales, so you pay for them out of your portion. Turns out that cousin Sally meant to mail a check, but left it in her car, later forgetting all about it. And your coworker’s daughter decided she is too old for dressing up so none of her friends are going to anyway. All of a sudden you are out $140 that you paid for their capes.

Moral of this story is that you do not want to lose any money on this. You also don’t want to chase people down for payment. I ended up eating the cost of one cape because I relaxed my rule for an old friend. After asking about it several times and getting what sounded like legitimate excuses, I decided that I didn’t want to harm a relationship over $15 and let it go. But my advice for you is to avoid putting yourself in that situation completely by only ordering capes that have been paid for.

If you don’t go through a third party and buy or make them yourself, you can have some more leeway on this. At least then you can sell capes to someone else. Either way, you want to make money to bring your child home, so treat this as a business transaction where a product is not issued until payment is received.

Don’t forget to get a superhero cape for the child you will adopt!

I am so glad that I thought to order a cape for my daughter. It gave me something tangible to connect the hard work that went into bringing her home to the sweet child who is now in my home. She doesn’t understand or even need to know the financial details of international adoption, but it makes my heart smile to see her running around with the cape flying behind her.

It is another reminder that the paperwork, training, fundraising, praying, and time spent waiting were all worth it. And I have the sweet little photo to prove it!

Have you run a successful superhero cape adoption fundraiser? I’d love to hear your tips in the comments below!

Read about our adoption journey here. Need more ideas for adoption fundraisers? Click here to get your list of 101 Adoption Fundraising Ideas and don’t forget to visit my Adoption Grants and Fundraising page.

You may be interested in these posts as well:

6 Expert Tips for a Successful Adoption Fundraiser Yard Sale

8 Ways We Raised $35,123.51 for Our Adoption Without Debt

How to Make Money with an Adoption T-Shirt Fundraiser

Why Our Family Decided to Adopt from China

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