So if we see something in the news, we call our designer in L.A.

for the most part, so we're able to turn them around really quickly. The cool thing about the Yandy-branded items is that we make them in L.A. We made it, like, six months ago and just didn't release it because we wanted to make a big splash with it for Halloween. But pizza rat, we jumped all over that. The only thing we did with that one was hold it back. We also pay attention to what's going on in the news during the year and especially what's going on in September and October. When #TheDress came out, everyone I knew was like, 'You gotta do this.' That one wasn't even an option. What we do is, we go out for Halloween, we see what people are wearing, and lots of times we get ideas from that. The people who are actually running the website or coming up with ideas for costumes and stuff like that, there's probably 12. In the past two years, during Halloween, we scale up to 200 employees, but most of those people are in the warehouse or customer service. But like the pizza, the watermelon, the Tootsie Roll, all the big ones in the past, those were all just me. How do these weird or meme-inspired sexy costumes actually come to fruition? Do you just think, Oh, I have a great idea! and then it's on shelves a month later? I think they're coming around where, like, maybe they realize now that when you turn a watermelon slice - like one of the first ones we did - or a Tootsie Roll and make it into a sexy Halloween costume, we know it's funny. The first few times they did it, they actually seemed angry about it. Yahoo! every year votes us 'The Top 10 Worst Sexy Halloween Costumes' or something like that and we always win. What are the biggest criticisms of your costumes? Our average top seller isn't all that much sexier than what a girl wears out to like a dance club in Scottsdale, you know, when I go out. I think some of the backlash we get is just from people that haven't gone out in a long time. But I think that just goes along with girls wanting to look good and feel good and feel attractive. Have your sexy costumes always sold better than the ones you would consider to be not sexy?įor us, our top sellers are always usually on the sexier side. So we were like one of the few places you could go to buy these and there was a huge demand because this was what girls were interested in. The mainstream stores like Party City and Spirit didn't really carry those at this point or not that much selection if they did. There wasn't that much competition in lingerie, but there was even less competition for sexy Halloween costumes. So the first Halloween in the garage, the lingerie manufacturers that we were working with had these sexier Halloween costumes and we stocked just a little bit of it. It just took off. How did you transition into making sexy costumes? It never really played out like that but I think 30 percent of our customers probably fall into that category. I felt like everyone was looking at me like, 'What is this guy doing in the store?' I honestly thought when we started it, that most of our customers would be male buying gifts for their wives or girlfriends. Actually, a funny story, I had a fiancé at the time and I went to buy some lingerie for Valentine's Day at Victoria's Secret and I just thought it was the most uncomfortable experience in the world. We just felt like lingerie was the perfect thing to sell online because it's one of those things I felt that people would want to buy in the privacy of their own home. We came together to try and start an e-commerce-based business because we knew that was the future of business. Me and my brother started Yandy in 2005 out of my two-car garage. How does a dude like you get into the lingerie business? Yandy CEO Chad Horstman, 37, spoke to about how things like Sexy Jellyfish come to be, what costumes are too controversial to ever realize, and the one vegetable he has just not been able to make as a sexy Halloween costume. Yandy, the lingerie company that produces Halloween gems like Sexy Olaf, Sexy Barney, and, most recently, Sexy Pizza Rat, has a long history of astounding people with its wonderfully silly and sexy costumes.

Sexy barney costume