HOME DEPOT’S 12-FOOT SKELETON: A SHORT HISTORY
Anna Deen, a writer for Grid News, has written a history of how Home Depot’s giant skeleton decoration became such a Halloween hit. Here are the details:
– Lance Allen, Home Depot’s senior merchant of decorative holiday, says the company is always looking for future products. They saw a giant skeleton torso at a trade show and the team thought, We can do better. Why not make it a full giant skeleton! They first drew up diagrams for a 10-foot skeleton but wanted to go even bigger. They settled on 12-feet tall.
– During development, they started calling the thing Skelly, and the name stuck. They’ve found the nickname makes the skeleton more personable.
– It was first put on the shelves during the first year of the pandemic, when consumers were really focused on home decor. They priced it at $299, and haven’t raised the price since.
– A woman named Jennifer Corcoran, created a Facebook group, the “12 Ft Skeleton Halloween Club,” as a joke after buying one herself. She says, “It was something new and interesting to get excited about.” The group now has 50,000 members and continues to grow.
– Most importantly, they created a scarcity. The product flew off shelves immediately, and it’s often out of stock. During the annual “Halloween in July” promotion, it sold out within hours, and that fact was put out on social media which, of course, created even more demand. As of Oct. 12, it’s been sold out online.
– Because it’s so hard to get now, having one has become a sort of social status symbol.
* Sure, you have to store the thing in the baby’s bedroom, but that’s a minor inconvenience for a great yard decoration.
* It should only be a few more weeks before Skelly has its own podcast, Netflix special, and NFT.
* Boy, she reduced this story to the bare bones.
* “Sorry, kids, but that skeleton out front cost $300 … so the only treats we have are tiny Tootsie Rolls. Just one per person, please!”
CLIP: They even have a set of audio instructions for how to assemble the skeleton.
