The owner of Schooner Bay Company says rivals from Temu to Tractor Supply Company are lifting its designs and making knockoffs overseas.
It is that time of year when both adults and children embrace the lore of Halloween.
From wholesome pumpkins to spooky stories, folks often delve into their ghostly side by displaying replications of these items both inside and outside their homes.
It is one of the busiest times of the year at Schooner Bay Company in East Berlin, Pennsylvania, where approximately 40 different Halloween-themed items are made and sold online.
Schooner Bay Company offers thousands of various historical decorative items for both home and office that encompass favorite images from the 17th century to present day. Business is brisk during Halloween season, second only to sales incurred during the Christmas holidays.
While Schooner Bay imports many of its products from India, all its ghoulish Halloween products are designed and manufactured at its American workshop.
“We make all of our artwork, decorative trays, holiday ornaments and wood silhouettes in-house in East Berlin,” said owner Megan Leib. “I would have to say our most popular product for Halloween is our Headless Horseman silhouette. Our silhouettes are made of pressed wood and sit on a wooden stand.”
The Headless Horseman features two headless riders sitting before a backdrop of an orange moon. The Headless Horseman is a mythical figure that has appeared in European folklore since the Middle Ages and has continued to be popularized in America through literature and in movies such as the 1820 short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and the 1999 Tim Burton film “Sleepy Hollow.”
Schooner Bay’s Headless Horseman has become so popular that people from China have taken notice, even though the communist country’s Halloween celebrations are limited to a few items like pumpkins and squash being displayed at stores that sell Western products.
Chinese manufacturers, however, have a keen eye when it comes to copying and reproducing Halloween items to sell in America.
“We started selling our wooden silhouettes on Amazon two years ago and pretty quickly some Chinese sellers started to knock us off, mainly with our Headless Horseman scene,” Leib said. “And this year, one of our employee’s wives was out shopping at Tractor Supply and there was a plastic light-up version of our design ‘Headless Horseman Moon.’ That’s the one that was copied.
“We produce that with our wood and the orange moon is printed and we kind of lay it all together and cut it out on the laser engraver and it’s all made of wood. Theirs is a plastic light-up one, but if you look it up by Googling Tractor Supply, Headless Horseman, you will see the cutout is exactly identical. They did not change anything.
“They are real easy to copy and we don’t have anything trade-marked because we are small, and it is expensive to get every single thing trade-marked or copyrighted and we just don’t have the resources to do it, so we don’t have a lot of recourse.”
While business has steadily increased year-over-year since Schooner Bay’s inception in 2018, Leib has noticed a slight decrease in sales of the Headless Horseman.
“We found several of our wood silhouettes on Amazon and we found them on Temu,” Leib said. “We are definitely selling less than before. It’s the idea of it. Especially for a company like Tractor Supply that says it’s for the working man and what they represent in the United States, the hard-working person.”
But despite the sales drop-off, the company continues to offer a lengthy list of Halloween items and historical reproductions designed out of wood, bone, iron, glass, porcelain, and brass based on the antiques they find.
“We have a whole frame shop, and we do all of our prints on canvas or paper with frames and we do paper cut scherenschnittes and silhouettes,” Leib said. “We import bone boxes and wooden boxes, but we print on them in-house, and we also do engraving.”
Schooner Bay also offers a large variety of reproductive paintings whose originals were produced hundreds of years ago. The company has a diverse collection of formal reproductions that were specifically made for them, and they also use photos or paintings that are in the public domain.
“If it’s over 100 years old or older it is out of copyright and it’s in the public domain,” Leib said. “You can go to the major museums’ websites and download high-quality images of the actual art. You can do whatever you want with it.”
Schooner Bay Co. is staffed by 12 employees that oversee everything from production and design to packaging and shipping. Most items are reasonably priced in this crowded marketplace.
In addition to selling on its own website, Schooner Bay offers its products on Amazon, Etsy, Chairish and E-Bay. For American-made Halloween-themed items, click here.