Balancing Cultural Influence With Prediction

Aubrey Horowitz, Merchant of Decorative Holiday at The Home Depot, is on the show to talk about the viral skeleton that set the Halloween decor bar 12 feet high. Aubrey shares a behind-the-curtain look at how Home Depot designs its seasonal assortment for America’s front lawns, shaped by a vocal community of haunters who shop earlier and earlier each year. 

Plus, we walk through Skelly’s ground-up development with suppliers, the future of app-controlled animatronics, the moving target of nostalgia (the ’90s are vintage now, but won’t be for long), and why the best feedback loop in retail is a customer base that never stops posting.

Icons Like Skelly Market Themselves

Key takeaways:

• Halloween enthusiasts finish planning by August, pulling seasonal demand into summer.
• Haunting is a mindset more shoppers are embracing. Home Depot is meeting growing demand by building collections year over year based on public feedback.
• Nostalgia never goes out of style, but which era defines the trend keeps shifting. Skelly brought haunted-house-scale giants to retail and turned yard decor into a creative medium.
• “You can all shop at the same retailer, and then come out with a completely unique and  completely different haunted yard scene.” — Aubrey Horowitz
• “How do I deliver a product that you may not know that you want yet, while also delivering the thing that you’re asking for?” — Aubrey Horowitz
• “In many ways the front yard is like the homepage of people’s lives.” — Brian Lange
• “We just had no idea that [Skelly] would take off and that people would wanna dress him up for all the holidays and leave him up year round.” — Aubrey Horowitz

In-Show Mentions:

• Skelly, The Home Depot’s 12-foot skeleton

Associated Links:

• Insiders 210: Spooky Commerce: What Halloween Shopping Trends Tell Us About Modern Culture
• Consumers are Overindulging on Halloween. Disney is Meeting the Moment.
• The Senses: Aug-tober is Here
• Insiders 239: The “Quiet Season” Fallacy: Why Waiting for Black Friday is Destroying Your Retail Business
• Field Notes: Holiday Edition: Spirit Christmas
• Insiders 040: Nostalgia as a Security Blanket
• Episode 426: The 13th Month of Revenue
• Episode 312: Barbenheimer: Nostalgia, Retail, Recall, and Relevance
• Join us at VISIONS Summit, November 3 at MoMA
• Check out Future Commerce on YouTube
• Check out Future Commerce+ for exclusive content and save on merch and print
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

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