How Home Depot became the go-to shop for viral Halloween decorations

A common internet joke from a few years back involved going to Target for one thing, and leaving with a cartful of unrelated items. And for the past several years, there’s been a new, very real threat to wallets across North America: Going to Home Depot for some tools, and coming home with a 12-foot-tall skeleton strapped to the roof of your Mini Cooper.

TikTok user Emma Kent documented this exact experience when she sent her boyfriend out for some batteries and he returned with Skelly, the internet’s nickname for Home Depot’s viral giant skeleton that has become a Halloween staple since it debuted in 2020. Skelly has inspired something of a cult fan base, with lovers of the towering decoration keeping it out all year and dressing it up for different holidays, creating videos of Skelly going on dates, and collecting a legion of smaller spooky friends to arrange around him.

According to Home Depot, Skelly is “so popular that it is the only product that we have brought back each year, and it has sold out every year that it’s been available.” This year, Home Depot has quadrupled the number of Skellies it made in 2020, continuing to sell the giant skeleton at $299. And the brand isn’t letting its marketing moment in the sun go to waste, either.

In the years following Skelly’s initial success, Home Depot has been working to create new decor that will grab fans’ attention. “Since creating the Giant 12-foot category, we have expanded our SKU selection of Giants by five times,” the company told Fast Company. 

This year, Home Depot announced its new offerings in July to drum up hype well ahead of Halloween season. Skelly will be joined by a $199 seven-foot skeleton dog companion, a $299 levitating reaper, a $279 animated Frankentstein’s monster created in collaboration with Universal Pictures, and more. 

We sat down with Lance Allen, Home Depot’s senior merchant of decorative holiday, to find out how the brand cooks up its viral decor each year in the wake of the Skelly craze.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Tell me about how you initially brainstormed the Skelly idea.

In 2019, we said, “What can we do differently at Home Depot?” At the time, everybody in the market was kind of carrying the same items—there was nothing unique out there for Halloween. Everybody was buying from the same factories and just changing some item colors. 

We started doing a space-productivity analysis, and a lot of items were wider at the time, which takes up more space on the floor. One of the thoughts was, if we go taller instead, we can get more productivity out of the floor space. So what classic Halloween icon can we do? That really started us off conceptually. Then we started watching all the old classic horror movies, walking through as many haunted houses as we could, and going to Halloween trade shows.

What we found was giant pieces of skeletons. If you went to some haunted houses, they had these big, oversize pieces—like a giant torso—but they were selling for $4,000 or $5,000, nothing an average consumer could afford. The thought was, let’s go ahead and take a classic skeleton, design it big and tall, and get it to a value that everybody can afford. At the time, a lot of people didn’t even know that [Home Depot] had Halloween items.

What are some design challenges with creating decor at Giant scale?

Of course, if you say, “I want to bring a 12-foot skeleton to Home Depot,” you get some internal pushback. We’ve got safety teams that have to make sure an item’s safe for customers to be around in-store, we’ve got engineering that wants to make sure it’s going to be able to hold up for all our customers in their yards. We had a lot of engineering and design work to make sure that this is the right piece to bring to market for a company with a name like us.

Once we got all that done, one of the biggest concerns was, how are customers going to be able to get this home? That was one of those internal fights. This piece is just so big! Something I really kept sticking to was that we should rent trucks at Home Depot for $19.95—so worst case, if we sell this at a good enough value, people will rent the truck and they’ll take it home.

Next thing we know, people are making videos of Skellies going on dates with them, people are taking them to the beach, we started seeing Skelly in weddings. When you see Skelly in a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial, a Budweiser commercial, all of a sudden it’s like, “Wow, we just created the greatest Halloween item ever!”

Are there any updates to Skelly this year?

He’s always had light up eyes, but now they have eight different modes you can change them to. We’ve always tried to make it so that you can retrofit any new changes into the old Skelly, so anybody who bought the older one can now go put those eyes in. 

This year, we also made a scary head, because a lot of people have been repainting their Skellies to make them look a little scarier. Now you can take off the old happy head and put on a scary head. And we’ve got an accessory kit that comes with pigtails, some great Mary Jane shoes, and our own version of a skeleton Birkin bag. It’s just fun stuff like that. We try to keep it fresh. 

What lessons did Skelly’s virality teach you to implement during the brainstorming process?

That really introduced us to a couple things. One was the demand for uniquely designed items; and that it was worth our time and to invest our teams into it to develop these unique items for Home Depot. That really helped us shift some resources and start putting some focus in making these exclusive items that you’d never find anywhere else. 

At a company level, one of the big eye-openers was, “Wow, look at the new traffic we’re driving into Home Depot with this Halloween program.” We’re getting a lot of customers who have not been into Home Depot before coming in to see this giant skeleton. 

Can you tell me a bit about this year’s new additions?

We need to talk about giants. First, we’ve got a levitating reaper that is definitely one of my favorite pieces. We built the whole support structure into its staff, so what’s so cool about this piece is it doesn’t look like there’s a frame attached to it at all. When it’s set up in a yard and the wind’s blowing, it looks like it’s flying away. If it wasn’t for the engineering and the design work we learned on Skelly, there’s no way we would have ever been able to build a piece like that.

Another favorite piece of mine is Knight Dullahan. He’s a headless horseman, but he’s got a skeleton head [in his hand]. There’s no frame under him, so he looks so real, and people can build a scene underneath him too. It’s just taking all those learnings that we’ve got over the years and incorporating it into these pieces. 

One thing I’d say we always try to do is, we don’t want everybody to come and buy every single item year one. We’re very careful about how we bring items out so they can keep adding onto their collections over the years. We don’t expect somebody to come and spend $1,000 or $2,000 in a year; come buy Skelly, then the next year come back and buy the dog, buy the knight, and then you can keep expanding that scene. Before you know it, you’ve become a focal point of the neighborhood.

Can you give us any hints on what to expect from Home Depot’s Halloween selection in 2025?

I’ve got everything done for next year, we just need to choose which items we’re going with—that’s how far we try to work ahead. What I will promise you, and your loyal readers, is that they will not be disappointed next year. We’re not slowing down anytime soon.