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“I never imagined I'd be jabbing at pumpkins for a living. It's made me realize that, if you're creative enough to try something really weird and go for it, you just might be able to carve a career out of it.”
Marc Evan and Chris Soria of Maniac Pumpkin Carvers in Brooklyn have been best friends since grade school, when they bonded over art and all things horror. In high school they built their own haunted house. In college they both landed at Parsons School of Design, and they paid for art school by working in bars and restaurants.
That's where the pumpkins started. Carving decorations for Halloween was something fun to do during downtime, but their competitive streaks took over. Within a couple of years they were turning out eerily realistic zombies and monsters with paring knives and the occasional lemon zester. They posted their work to a Flickr account. A Wired editor found it and wrote a quick article that went viral, and requests for custom pumpkins poured in. Martha Stewart, the Food Network, and the New York Yankees took notice. Yankee Stadium had them carve 50 pumpkins, each with a detailed logo, for the skybox seats.
Their tiny apartment became a pumpkin dungeon. They bought the pumpkins, scooped them out, drew the designs, and did every carving themselves. Then they launched a website, maniacpumpkincarvers.com. Startup costs were low because they already owned inexpensive hand tools from school. No power tools needed. In the early years they also did guerrilla marketing, showing up at places to carve pumpkins people would share.
A regular jack-o'-lantern might cost you $15. Their work runs from $150 for a simple logo to $700 or more for a complex design. The season goes from September to Thanksgiving, and they carve anywhere from 500 to 1,000 pumpkins. The rest of the year they work as professional artists, including murals up to eight stories tall. Clients have included Oprah, Good Morning America, BMW, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone. One time they hid a $3 million diamond inside a pumpkin for a national Tiffany's ad campaign.
