Maniac Pumpkin Carving! This Spooky Side Hustle Won’t Scare You Away

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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Guess what today is? Today, at least for those who are listening in real time, if you're listening later, this day still existed. This is the 31st of October and I would like to wish you a happy Halloween. Happy Halloween from Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

Now naturally, I've got a spooky story for you and one that is scarily profitable. By now, our longtime listeners know that you never know what you might hear on the show from day to day, so many different stories and examples of all kinds of crazy ways to make money. And it's not just you, by the way, I feel the same way. Every day, every week, I'm looking at all the different stories coming across my desk, all the stuff that we have in the pipeline. And I'm like, wow, this Sadducel was actually bigger than I first thought when we started 668 days ago.

So for today, what if I told you that you could get paid a lot of money for carving pumpkins? I'm not talking eliminate stand money. I'm talking tens of thousands of dollars per season, carving hundreds of pumpkins and earning up to $700 each. Yep, $700 each. These are some premium pumpkins.

And to be clear, the two guys I'll tell you about today work hard for their money. A love of art and all things Halloween lead two friends to carve out a chunk of seasonal profits. Stay tuned for what they call maniac pumpkin carving. [Music]

Halloween comes with a lot of traditions. Dressing up, trick or treating, toilet papering people's homes who don't give you good candy.

But none of these are more symbolic of the holiday than the classic jack-o'-lantern. Originally brought over by the Irish as a ward against the spirits, the jack-o'-lantern has come far from its humble turnip roots. And that's a true story, by the way. The original jack-o'-lantern was a turnip. For most of us, the act of carving a jack-o'-lantern consists of enthusiastic, albeit often misguided, jabs at a pumpkin with a kitchen knife, removing the guts and plenty of futile attempts to create something even vaguely resembling a face.

But for Mark Evan and Chris Soria of Maniac Pumpkin Carvers in Brooklyn, New York, it is so much more. To properly tell this story, we need to go back to the 1990s. You see, Mark and Chris are not just business partners. They've been best friends since grade school, where they first bonded over a shared love of art and all things horror. The days leading up to Halloween were spent creating gruesome makeup for elaborate costumes, planning out the best candy route, and then in high school, even planning and building their very own haunted house.

But they really hit their spooky stride in college. Being artistic geniuses, they both landed spots at Parsons School of Design, one of the country's top art institutions. There, they were able to test their metal and explore a broad range of mediums. Digital works, painting, illustration, photography, they were always eager to experiment with something new. Art school isn't cheap, so to pay their way, they worked at a number of bars and restaurants in the area.

It was there that they first began experimenting with a medium of a more organic nature. That medium was pumpkins. As Mark said, it all began innocently enough. It was just something fun that they would do during their downtime at work to set up decorations for Halloween, but their competitive natures took them to new and more daring heights. Over the course of a couple years, they went from carving simple jack-o'-lanterns to full-on works of art.

With the assistance of paring knives and the occasional lemon zester, Mark and Chris chipped, peeled, and carved away chunks of pulp to reveal eerily realistic-looking zombies and monsters of all shapes and sizes. As Halloween week itself rolled around, they began chronicling their masterpieces and posting them to a Flickr account. An editor at Wired magazine, eager for something themed, stumbled across one of the images and published a quick article on them that went viral, and not in a zombie virus type of way, although the timing was ideal for such a thing. Soon, the request for customized jack-o'-lanterns came pouring in faster than an unchecked arterial wound. Their designs caught the attention of Martha Stewart, the Food Network, and even the New York Yankees.

That was right around the World Series, and Yankee Stadium had them carve up 50 pumpkins with a detailed logo for each of their Skybox seats. The two friends, aka "Moniacal Pumpkin Slashing Duo," transformed their tiny apartment into a dungeon of pumpkin destruction to keep up with demand. Within the first week, every corner was littered with the grisly remains of pumpkins, including pounds of pulp and an unlimited supply of seeds. As their viral reach spread, they attracted more clients, all the while doing everything themselves. They would purchase the pumpkins, depulp them, draw out designs, and of course, the actual carvings.

It was at this moment, up to their elbows and pulp and sticky seeds, that they realized this could be something big. So, as the next year's season approached, Maniac Pumpkin Carvers reared its grinning jack-o'-lantern head, and Mark and Chris launched a website to highlight their wicked skills. But, you ask, how exactly does one carve their way into an industry like this? Well, according to Mark, it starts with a really good pumpkin. Not just any old pumpkin will do, you especially want to look for one with a long stem.

Each pumpkin then gets a thorough washing, a gentle massage and hot towel to the face, little foot rub, and then it's time to map out a design. You might think that tools for something like this would be expensive, but the startup costs were scarily low. They were able to use a lot of the inexpensive hand tools that they used for school. No power tools necessary. You might also think, well, that sounds great, Chris, but how much do they cost?

These premium pumpkins don't come at a penny-pinching price. Although your traditional jack-o'-lantern with a lopsided grin can put you out of pocket no more than $15, that's for a run-of-the-mill pumpkin and a cheap carving kit, Mark and Chris's creepy creative creations can cost anywhere from $150 for a simple logo all the way up to $700 or more for complex designs. Now, this is a seasonal business. It typically runs from September to the end of November, and when they aren't on a hunt for a good pumpkin, or is it a hunt, Mark and Chris work as professional artists, not just in the pumpkin field, but as muralists who get called to jobs all over the country for designs that have reached eight stories tall. But during that season, September to Thanksgiving, team Maniac is focused on creating as many works of temporary art as possible, and that generally means anywhere from 500 to 1,000 pumpkins.

Over the years, they've worked with Oprah, Good Morning America, BMW, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone, just to name a few clients. One time, they even put a $3 million diamond inside one of their pumpkins and had it featured in a national ad campaign for Tiffany's. There's still a lot left on the chopping block for this team of renegade pumpkin carvers, and ultimately for them, the work isn't about the money. It's about all those free pumpkin seeds. Okay, I just added that part in.

It's actually about the innovation and change in the industry that they've been able to fuel. As Mark said, he never imagined he'd be getting paid well to jab at pumpkins for a living. It's made him realize that if you're creative enough to try something really weird and go for it, you just might be able to carve out a career. [Music]

Well, you know what is really scary? Depending on one company or employer or one source for your only income.

That's what Side Hustle School is all about, trying to help you diversify your income, create something for yourself, whether it is an artistic project like carving out pumpkins or something totally different. I have seen over and over the power of building something for yourself. Even if you're perfectly happy at your job, even if you wanna remain there, that's fine. What matters is creating independence so that you have the choice. You have the choice to stay, the choice to go, the choice to do what matters to you.

So on this special day and every day, I encourage you to ask yourself, what's one thing I can do to get closer to the thing I believe in? What's one thing I can do to get closer to those goals? To where I have a life of opportunity and choice and then I can decide for myself, what's best for me? That is my hope for you. If you'd like to check out the show notes and see some pretty amazing pumpkin art, just come to sidehustleschool.com/669.

That is episode 669. Thank you so much for listening today. Be safe out there. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.

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