Walking into the Grand Ball Costumes shop can be described as taking a trip to an amusement park without rides, but with plenty of attractions.

The store is a grab bag of gag gifts, mascot uniforms, Halloween costumes and much more.

As students peruse around the store, a friendly, golden brown-haired woman approaches them.

“May I help you find something?” she asks.

Her name is Jayne Ball-Saret, owner of Grand Ball Costumes, 609 Sixth St.

She’s been in business in Charleston for 12 years.

“During Halloween I have other people to help me, but the rest of the year I’m the only one who works here,” Ball-Saret said. “It’s just me and 60,000 costumes.”

And 60,000 is not an exaggeration.

For the small spot the store occupies (across from the Charleston Police Department on Sixth Street), the storage in the warehouse is massive stretching a half-block long and three stories deep.

Ball-Saret explained that she built up her stock of novelty apparel by offering her customers something not many businesses offer, “If you ask me for . something I don’t have, I’ll build it for you free of charge.”

While customers had to pay for the costume materials, she said her labor was free of charge as long as she could keep the costume.

“You don’t have to clean ’em, you don’t have to store ’em, but they’ll be mine,” she continued. “Now it’s my job to find other people who need that (costume) and that I’ll get my labor back by renting that (costume) to other people.”

The only way she can keep all that stock organized is by racks upon racks of costumes broken down into size and decade.

“I’ve made it or put it here so I know where they are,” Ball-Saret said as she reminds a lost employee where the Poison-Ivy costume is in the back of the warehouse. “We’ve got maps everywhere . There’s gotta be a way for (employees) to find it, so people (aren’t) up there waiting.”

Customer satisfaction is not only an important of her job, but it’s also the most rewarding.

“If you listen to the customer, they’ll tell you what they want,” she said. “They may not know cause we may bring them like three (costumes) they didn’t even think of, but we find ’em back there when we start the search.”

While her operation is located in Charleston, she ships to customers all over the country through her Web site http://users.net66.com/~baldee.

But even with her national customers, Eastern students are her most loyal.

“My best salesmen are Eastern students,” she said. “They leave here they go teach out in the world . in some small school that doesn’t have a costume shop in the area and they call me and I ship it to them.”

It’s the quality designing of the costumes and the friendly service that keeps her customers coming back year after year.

The customers here are all fun people or they just don’t belong here,” she said. “And I love the designing, I love the creative part of it and that gets me back to he roots of what I studied.”

And what she studied was theatre and the related arts.

Ball-Saret graduated from Eastern with a bachelor’s degree in theatre and eventually earned her master’s degree in related arts.

“If you do something you love, you’re much more apt to really pursue it and give it your effort and time,” she added. “And that’s sometimes what it takes.”