The Snuggie Sold 35 Million Units By Being a Bathrobe Facing the Wrong Way

Before there was a wearable blanket category, there was the Snuggie, and before the Snuggie there was a bathrobe. The great insight of 2008 was that if you turned the bathrobe around so it opened at the back, you could sell twenty million of them in a year. This is not a criticism. It is arguably the finest piece of lateral thinking in the history of soft furnishings.

The Numbers Are Absurd

Allstar Marketing Group, founded in 1999 by chief executive Scott Boilen, brought it to market in 2008. It cleared more than $40 million in its first three months. Twenty million units moved in the first year. Reported lifetime sales run past 35 million, and the figure is usually given as covering both the human and the dog varieties, because there is a dog version, because of course there is.

Aggregate Snuggie revenue has been reported at over half a billion dollars. A backwards dressing gown. Half a billion dollars.

It Is Still Selling, Which Is the Real Story

The current listing carries 4.4 stars across 7,232 ratings and sits around thirty-four thousandth in Home and Kitchen, which for a product whose cultural moment was during the Bush administration is remarkable staying power. Most infomercial products die when the infomercial stops. This one crossed over into being an actual household object that people quietly replace when it wears out.

The Advertising Did the Work

Anyone who owned a television in 2009 can still picture the commercial. A family on a sofa, defeated by their own blankets, arms trapped, unable to reach the remote or answer the phone, living in a state of quiet fleece-based crisis. Then the Snuggie arrives and everyone can use their hands again. It was direct-response advertising at its most shameless, inventing a problem in the first fifteen seconds and solving it in the next ten, and it worked so completely that the product outsold entire fashion labels.

A Note on Classification

Amazon files the Snuggie under Home and Kitchen rather than clothing, and we think that is the correct and slightly cowardly decision. Is it a garment? You put it on. You wear it. It has sleeves. But nobody has ever left the house in one on purpose, and the retail taxonomy has quietly acknowledged that by shelving it next to the towels.

Snuggie Versus the Modern Competition

Its descendants, the fleece-lined hoodie types, are better made and better marketed. They are also missing something. The Snuggie has no hood, no pretence and no design ambition whatsoever. It is a rectangle of fleece with two tubes attached, sold with total sincerity, and there is a purity to that which the premium wearable blanket market has lost. One size, 71 by 54 inches, sleeves, done.

The Verdict

Own one. Not ironically, and not as a gift for somebody you dislike. Own one because it is the original, because it costs less than a takeaway, and because for a few months in 2009 the entire English-speaking world agreed to laugh at it and then quietly bought thirty-five million of them anyway. That is the most honest thing that has ever happened in retail. Check the listing for the current price and pick the colour you would least like to be photographed in.