Tylenol Reshaped Halloween Industry
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A story about how the 1982 Tylenol cyanide crisis unexpectedly led to the consolidation of the Halloween costume industry.
"There was something called the cyanide killer. In Tylenol packages, a whole bunch of Tylenol got laced with cyanide and people died. They never caught the person. It scared a bunch of people - holy shit, Tylenol, this safe thing?
Candy sales plummeted as people got afraid. These Halloween companies got over their skis because everything was going great, and they started to falter during this crash. People did not want to eat candy from strangers during the cyanide rush.
Ruby's (a costume company) ends up buying up Ben Cooper and Collegeville and basically consolidates all the licenses under one roof during that time. Now they have Disney, Marvel, whoever. Their job isn't run by theater geeks - their big thing is operations for supply chain and forecasting. They have to predict who is going to be popular next year for Halloween.
They work with all the studios who give them sketch sheets of upcoming movies, showing who's the good guy, who's the bad guy, and what their costumes look like. The movie industry makes hundreds of millions off of Halloween costume royalties - they get like an 8 to 10% royalty."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.