3 Things: Spirit Halloween for Other Holidays, Diapers.com for Seniors, Wheel for Home Health

Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently and associated business opportunities. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:

• Spirit Halloween for Other Holidays

• Diapers.com for Seniors

• Wheel for Home Health

1. Spirit Halloween for Other Holidays

If you’ve lived in the US for long enough, it’s highly likely that you’ve been into a Spirit Halloween store. This seasonal retailer only exists for an 8ish week period during September and October each year where seemingly out of nowhere, they pop open 1400 stores across the country; marked by their signature orange banners. The first pop-up opened in the Castro Valley Mall in 1984 and quickly grew to 60 seasonal stores before being acquired by Spencer’s Gifts in 1999. Their asset light, short-term lease model is both extremely novel when it comes to retail and also exceptionally lucrative, despite being open for such a short window of time. The company takes over vacant retail locations, hires 30,000 temp workers, and sells everything you can think of when it comes to halloween costumes, decorations, and more. They are estimated to be doing around $1.3B in annual revenue.

Given the retailpocalypse had been in full swing prior to the pandemic and was dramatically accelerated over the past few years, the number of vacant storefronts in strip malls, downtowns, big box store locations, etc have exploded. Why not take the Spirit Halloween model and apply it to other holidays? Pick big ones that the majority of people celebrate and like to decorate/buy gifts for like Christmas/Hanukkah, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, Valentines Day, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day. Since it wouldn’t just be for 2 months a year, you could potentially take on more permanent leases (which are cheap right now due to oversupply and lack of demand) and just swap out the inventory, banners, and marketing. Kind of like how the candy at the grocery stores changes packaging for different holidays, the locations would just completely transform. With a more permanent operation, you can also avoid having to staff up with so many temp workers each year.

2. Diapers.com for Seniors

For the first 2ish years of a baby’s life, they will go through around 6,000 diapers before they are potty trained. Disposable diapers are a $75+B annual business globally with ~$20B of that coming from the US where 95% of families use disposable diapers. When you go to the store (or online) the number of brands selling baby diapers is overwhelming. From the well known incumbents like Pampers and Huggies to modern brands like Coterie, Honest Company, and Hello Bello. There are also plenty of companies now producing biodegradable diapers like Dyper (made from bamboo) and Nest Diapers, as disposable diapers are absolutely horrible for the environment and responsible for up to 1/3 of all landfill waste.

Diapers.com (which was originally known as 1800Diapers) was started in 2005 and was innovative in bringing diapers and other baby products to the internet. In its first year, the company sold $2.5m of product and was acquired by Amazon in 2010 for $545m. While there has been a ton of innovation for the youngest of humans, life is a bell curve and at the other end of the spectrum, it’s likely that you’ll end up in some version of diaper again. The adult diaper market is already a ~$40B market and expected to grow to $52B by 2028. When you think of diapers for seniors, pretty much the only name that will come to mind is Depend. The reality is, now that humans are living longer, aging in place, and seniors are more internet savvy, there needs to be some innovation in this side of the market. Create a modern, eco-friendly, digitally native brand and market to baby boomers who are the first tech-friendly (enough) generation of seniors. Adult diapers are not covered by Medicare so the go-to-market for a product in this category would likely be direct to consumer via ads, content, and digital partnerships.

3. Wheel for Home Health

The demands on healthcare providers and strain on our healthcare system has never been more acute than over the past few years. The supply and demand gap for nurses, mental health professionals, and other specialities is already huge and growing by the year. As the global population ages, more people will suffer from disease like Alzheimers and dementia, forms of cancer, as well as orthopedic issues and being able to be treated at home is becoming both preferred by everyone as well as more prevelant. The global home healthcare market is already $336B annually (with $133B spent in the US) and will only continue to grow as seniors prefer to age in place and the payors/providers trying to shift the point of care to the home which is far less expensive than a hospital setting. The challenge of providing quality home healthcare is that it requires professionals of all kinds, equipment, and consumables (wound care, urology products, oxygen, etc) to reach patients in their places of residence.

With the exponential growth of telehealth and DTC healthcare startups over the last few years, many providers began opting to work for these companies where they can work from home, work at the top of their license, and have flexibility in employer. Wheel is a company that is leveraging this trend and aggregates healthcare professionals and helps match them to telehealth and other digital health companies who are looking for their skills. I think there is an opportunity for a similar model within home health of aggregating supply of professionals and matching to home health companies that need specific labor in specific locations. It could provide a more efficient way of meeting the growing demand and could enable healthcare workers to potentially provide services for multiple companies who operate in their area. Since home healthcare requires being in a specific location, you could start with a small target geo, partner with local schools, training programs, hospitals, etc to build up the supply side of the marketplace and then repeat the model in each new location.

That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please subscribe and share with a friend or two!

~ Elaine

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