If you’ve ever been to the Halloween Store in NYC a couple of days before October 31, you know it’s a truly unforgettable experience. After queuing for a good while, you finally get into the store and choose your costume from an abundance of options, and the only way out is through the exit door. No turning back. Add the NYC Halloween parade to that and you get a day nobody forgets. If you have an online store, you don’t have to go to these lengths to make it feel like the holidays, as you’ll see right away, even if you don’t have a special holiday product edition.
Who Gives a Crap is a toilet paper brand that started in Melbourne, Australia in 2012. Its limited Halloween edition, The Spooky Edition, is now live on the website, and it’s a great opportunity to see what microcopy can do for you.
The Dry Details
The product description opens with sound effects where the first spec would normally sit, a boo, an eek and a toot, and the third one tells you what kind of brand you’re dealing with. An ordinary spec list follows and stays ordinary until the last bullet, which promises the rolls are definitely not haunted. The joke sits at the end of the list, where a scanning reader lands last, so the facts get read first and the smile is what’s left over.
Wipe If You Dare
I just love the idea of framing the rolls for Halloween decorating, and the headline here is wonderful and so is the image. The mood is cheap in the best sense. One orange backdrop, the shadow of a creeping hand and a skeleton hand reaching for a roll repeat from the hero to the gallery to the “Wipe if you dare” section, so the images read as one set instead of six unrelated photos. You don’t need a high-end production to get atmosphere, because a color, a shadow and a prop do the work.
Is My Toilet Haunted?
The FAQ is where most stores go back to gray, and this one keeps its costume on. The first question, how long the edition will last, gets a fortune teller’s answer that still delivers the useful part: by the brand’s own account, last year’s edition sold out in under a week. The last question is even funnier: “Is my toilet haunted?” Sure, let’s blame a ghost for that toilet seat that’s always up!
Takeaways:
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Count the slots you already own before designing anything new. The announcement bar, the hero headline, the last spec bullet and one FAQ answer are all copy that exists today and can be rewritten in an afternoon. Pick the next holiday on the calendar and rewrite those four lines in its voice before you open a design file.
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Put the joke next to the fact, never instead of it. The spec list and the FAQ here keep every real answer and let the humor ride at the end or alongside. Keep the questions your customers actually ask, and add one holiday question at the bottom of the list.
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Choose one backdrop color and one prop, then reuse them everywhere. The repetition is what turns separate images into a set. Take one afternoon of photos and use the same setup for the bar, the hero and the gallery.
Dee2See by Lihi Lothan reviews DTC ecommerce experiences for brand managers and growth teams. We look at what happens between “I’m interested” and “I bought it.”
