You want to keep warm when your feeling chilled, but you don’t want to raise your heating bill (cash register bell cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching) Blankets are ok, but they can slip and slide. And when you reach for something your hands are trapped inside. Sound familiar? NOW there’s the SNUGGIE- the blanket that has sleeves!
Ahh yes.. It’s like a fleece robe that you wear like a hospital gown. What I love about the Snuggie is it’s not brilliant in the innovation of the product, but the way they sell it. Throughout the commercials they emphasize how “restricting” and “trapped” normal blankets make you feel, and how the Snuggie’s sleeves allow you to hold cordless phones that look like there from the late 80s, bowls of popcorn, books, laptops, and even babies or dogs! The pinnacle of ridiculousness is when they suggest you can wear it out to a ball game surrounded by people dressed in normal clothes like coats. And the three of them are sitting in the middle of it all, wearing these preposterous Snuggies, looking, seriously, like they are in some sort of very frightening fleece cult. It’s no wonder the people around them are trying desperately to ignore the dangerous Snuggie Family and just watch the game.
They claim that similar products sell for up to sixty dollars. Similar products, eh? Well I did a little research and discovered the SLANKET. Virtually the same product but didn’t get as hyped up. And they actually sell for about forty dollars, and come in many more colors other than burgundy, sage green, and royal blue. But the most perplexing part of the Slanket is that their website makes it totally seem like they are trying to appeal to college students. They have various photos of twenty-something year olds posing using their sleeves to the best of their abilities, watching the big game, ordering a pizza, and wearing weird wigs.
First originating in 1998, the creator was actually in college at the time. “While watching Late Night with Conan O'Brien I decided I needed to tear a hole in my sleeping bag so I could keep my upper body warm as I channel surfed during the commercial breaks. During Christmas vacation I commissioned the first Slanket to be made by my mother...and it was born.” So why haven’t we heard of the Slanket? I appreciate that every infomercial must have the ”similar products“ line in it. But in this case, well, — similar products? Really? There have been previous unsuccessful attempts to sell the blanket with sleeves? And these failed entrepreneurs decided that sixty dollars was about the right price point?
Snuggie’s are offered for the amazing price of $14.95 and not only that but they offer a bonus prize … a ”compact, press-and-open book-light,“ a fifteen-dollar value absolutely free! This makes me wonder how they decide which cheap contraption gets to be the main item and which one has to be the lousy bonus prize. Like, couldn’t this have been a whole commercial about the ”press-and-open book-light,“ and as a bonus you get the blanket with sleeves? I’m sure they have market analysts who study it.
So even though Snuggies try to appeal to men, women, and children who they assume all find it frustrating to be trapped beneath blankets, perhaps widening their intended audience made them more well known than their competitors. Or maybe it’s their humorous infomercial that’s most definitely intended to be funny that everyone knows this product from. All I know is that they are available at Walgreen’s by the checkout and there is a 1000 person pub-crawl planned for downtown Chicago on March 21st. So I may be buying one of these in the near future so I can participate along with my fellow drunken friends and their reading lights—for a blanket-covered, bar-hopping adventure!
Snuggie Pub Crawl
https://www.getsnuggie.com/flare/next?tag=os|sm|go|tm
http://www.theslanket.com/
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