What’s 12-feet tall and has become a common sight in many neighborhoods?
It’s called Skelly, a giant skeleton designed by a team that includes a Georgia-based Home Depot worker.
Rachel Little, a Warner Robins native, had a hand in bringing the giant skeleton to life, as a senior product engineer for decorative holiday team at The Home Depot.
For the past five years, Little, a 2015 graduate from Georgia Tech, has worked on many of the Halloween and Christmas decorations made and sold by the Atlanta-based company.
It’s a months-long process and collaboration between the decorative holiday team and supplier partners to bring decorations to life. Little said they go to trade shows, look at movies and TV shows and try to see what are the biggest things in pop culture at the time to come up with any new ideas.
“What do people want, what do people hate? We kind of combine all that information together to kind of pick the different themes and items we want,” Little said.
Skelly is a favorite among shoppers. Little said the production and popularity of the decoration, which sells out fairly quickly every year, was aided by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We had started developing that one already and then, bam, COVID happened in 2020,” Little said. “With everyone being at home, I think (Skelly) being so giant and being able to (be seen) from a far distance, really helped with him being so popular.”
Credit: Photo provided by The Home Depot
Credit: Photo provided by The Home Depot
For Skelly, Little said the team thought about the fact theme parks have a lot of similar decorations and structures of that size, so they decided why not let people have something like that to put outside their homes.
Although extremely popular, Skelly is not the only product Little has worked on.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
As a Star Wars fan, Little said she is most excited about a Yoda decoration, with motors to allow Yoda’s ears and eyes to move, as well as a lightsaber. Her team also decided on a theme of spooky Christmas that incorporates Jack Frost in many of their decorations.
“We even have like a creepy Christmas kind of thing going on this year with Jack Frost, but seeing the love people have for that one because that one I was honestly a little worried people would be too scared by it because I like spooky but not everyone else does,” she said.
The most difficult part of working on holiday decorations is keeping them a secret for months. At times, the decorations her team has worked on for months no longer fit the theme they were aiming for, so they have to be shelved for the following year causing them to keep it a secret for a longer period of time.
“The hardest part is too many good things. We have a lot of really awesome stuff we come up with and then sometimes it just doesn’t fit in the theme we have for the year,” she said.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Little moved to Atlanta to go to Georgia Tech and study biochemical engineering. It was through her network at Georgia Tech and mutual friends that she was able to land the job at The Home Depot.
Little used to enjoy Christmas more than Halloween but as she grew up, she became a bigger fan of the spooky holiday. Her favorite part is seeing her creations come to life in people’s yard and seeing how creative people get.
“It’s so exciting. I think that’s the most rewarding and best part is seeing how people decorate their houses, seeing the creativity people put with the items too,” Little said. “There are some outfits we never even thought of to put on Skelly or the different ways people put their sets together.”
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