The Georgia Tech Alumna Who Helped Create This Viral 12-Foot-Tall Halloween Skeleton
By: Jennifer Herseim | Categories: Alumni Interest
Engineer a giant skeleton and win Halloween? Rachel Little, BME 15, senior product engineer with The Home Depot’s decorative holiday team, can do that.
Have you seen “Skelly” in your neighborhood? Share your photos on social media.
If you needed one more reason to love Halloween, every time you see Skelly, the shockingly tall skeleton that towers over trick-or-treaters in your neighborhood, know that there’s a Georgia Tech engineer behind the phenomenon.
Rachel Little, BME 15, is a senior product engineer at The Home Depot, where she works on the company’s Halloween and Christmas decorations. In 2020, her team was responsible for bringing Skelly to life, so to speak, engineering the 12-foot-tall skeleton from skull to boney toes.
“A lot of the work I get to do is similar to what I did at the Invention Studio at Georgia Tech,” Little says. She reviews 3D-printed models of the products before they move forward with manufacturing and then ship to stores. Often, the trickiest part in the design process is concealing structural frames and making the products withstand weather, she says. “Wind is always the biggest challenge for me,” Little says. In 2020, when her senior merchant of decorative holidays came to her and the team with the idea for a giant skeleton, Little thought, “OK, this is a good challenge.” Fortunately, Skelly has a lot of bones that wind can pass through.
When Skelly was first released, he sold out within a few weeks. “It was the perfect storm,” Little says, “It was the first year of Covid and everyone was stuck at home, so people really leaned into doing exterior decorations.” Little says she’s been amazed at the reaction to Skelly. The skeleton’s oversized presence brought smiles to people’s faces and even spawned its own viral videos on social media, where people shared Tik Tok videos of the giant skeleton strapped to the top of small cars.
Today, Skelly is still hard to find in stores. He usually sells out a few weeks after release. Not to worry though, Little and the team keep raising the bar. This year, they introduced a 13-foot-tall animatronic Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Aside from Jack, Little’s favorite new decoration is “Lethal Lily,” a 7-foot witch with a skin-like texture and servo motors that animate her eyes and head.
For Little, who has a degree in biomedical engineering and once thought of becoming a doctor, the fact that she has a job where she works on skeleton decorations is a little ironic.
She points out that Skelly is not anatomically correct. “We did have to adjust the neck because it ended up looking way too long.”
Little has been at The Home Depot for five years. Before that, she was working in the medical device industry when a friend told her about the open position for an engineer working on Halloween at The Home Depot. “I thought, ‘Halloween is fun.’ I get to be sort of an ‘Imagineer’ and stay in Atlanta. I felt like it was a bit of a miracle how it happened.”
As it turns out, Halloween is her favorite time of the year. Growing up, Little would help her father build haunted houses, decorating the space with broken porcelain doll heads and spider webs in the windows.
Little’s Halloween decorating advice is simple: Have fun with it and don’t take it too seriously. “Spider webs and Halloween string lights can go a long way in enhancing your set. And fog. I always love fog.”
