Aubrey Horowitz of Home Depot: "We Plan Halloween 3 Years in Advance"

Oct 14, 2026

Aubrey Horowitz, The Home Depot’s Merchant of Decorative Holiday, reveals how Skelly became a 12-foot Halloween icon. She explores the rise of front-yard self-expression, the haunter community’s influence, app-controlled animatronics, modular displays, shifting nostalgia, and how viral customer feedback shapes seasonal retail.

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INSIGHT

Skelly Turned Yards Into Creative Stages

Skelly transformed Halloween retail by making haunted-house-scale props affordable and accessible.
Shoppers now use Home Depot products as building blocks for highly personalized yard scenes.

INSIGHT

Haunters Became Home Depot’s Research Team

Home Depot treats online haunter communities as an ongoing product research channel.
Enthusiasts share custom props, scenes, and trends that help shape assortments for both experts and casual decorators.

INSIGHT

Halloween Planning Now Peaks Before August

Halloween demand has moved sharply into summer because serious enthusiasts finish planning by August.
Retail availability follows customer planning behavior rather than traditional holiday calendars.

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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
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