Nothing says “Merry Christmas” quite like a 7.5-foot-tall Chewbacca holding a candy cane. At least, according to the team at Home Depot.
Home Depot has long been known as a purveyor of holiday decor, from pumpkins at Halloween to a wide selection of real and artificial trees at Christmas. In recent years, though, it’s been upping the creative ante on its decor game to capture new audiences—and, in some cases, to score a viral hit on TikTok.
This year, it’s doing just that with two new additions to its holiday lineup: life-size, animated versions of Star Wars’ Chewbacca and R2-D2 ($349 and $299, respectively), complete with movie-accurate, motion-activated sound effects.
While Home Depot declined to share specific sales data about the characters, R2-D2 appears to have sold out within weeks of debuting, inspiring several TikTok videos with hundreds of thousands of views and resulting in multiple Reddit forums where users are discussing strategies for getting their hands on one of the units. Resellers are already pedaling the product on eBay for nearly double its original price.
With its increasingly extravagant Halloween animatronics and now its suite of nerdy, high-tech Christmas decor, Home Depot is making the spectacle of extreme holiday decorating accessible to the average customer.
Home Depot is turning extreme holiday decorating into an accessible sport
Home Depot is no stranger to building head-turning (and TikTok view-farming) holiday decor. In fact, its towering 12-foot-tall skeleton, Skelly (who debuted in 2020), is what initially propelled the big box store to its current status as customers’ go-to shop for viral decor. Since then, Home Depot has leaned into both the scale and detail of its holiday decor, including with Halloween releases this year like a seven-foot-tall Frankenstein and 9.5-foot-long haunted pirate ship. Now bringing that same amped-up energy into Christmas.
Chewie and R2-D2 are part of Home Depot’s range of IP-adapted characters, which include other popular characters like Chucky, a 13-foot-tall Jack Skellington from Disney’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, and, also new this year, Olaf from Disney’s Frozen. The company already sells a seven-foot-tall Darth Vader and six-foot-tall Stormtrooper.
Aubrey Horowitz, Home Depot’s senior merchant of decorative holiday, says Home Depot’s Star Wars line plays to a couple of different emerging genres of holiday shoppers. One is the seasonal decor enthusiast, who tends to like to refresh their decor from one holiday to the next—which is why characters like the Stormtrooper, Darth Vader, and R2-D2 all come with modifications to transition from Halloween to Christmas.
Another is the holiday shopper that’s interested in nostalgic aesthetics, from vintage-looking artificial trees to retro characters. That tracks with data Pinterest shared with Fast Company, which found that searches for “nostalgic Christmas aesthetic” were up 1,130% this November compared with last November.
With the majority of its IP collections, Home Depot is able to capture fans by keeping prices relatively low: For comparison, other life-size replicas of R2-D2 can run between $1,500 and $8,000. Clearly, the choice is resonating with fans online. A commenter under one video of R2-D2 with more than 130,000 views wrote, “Take my money. Now I can put this alongside my R2D2 Pepsi cooler.” And under a separate clip of Chewbacca, commenters are responding with photos of their own Home Depot Chewie surrounded by other Star Wars characters (and one dressed in a sports jersey).
This holiday season, Home Depot is making sure that the most eccentric dad on your block can tap into his childlike wonder without breaking the bank—and we’re not mad about it.