Snuggie

Allstar Marketing Group launched the Snuggie in autumn 2008 — essentially a fleece robe worn backwards, sold through a direct-response TV spot: $14.95, buy-one-get-one, free book lights included. The commercial's premise was gloriously literal. Blankets are OK, the voice-over explained, but they slip and slide, and your hands are trapped inside. The solution: a blanket with sleeves. The earnest b-roll — a family in matching red Snuggies, a woman answering the phone in her fabric pod, the stadium wave — made it an instant national punchline. Jay Leno mocked it, Ellen mocked it, Jon Stewart mocked it, and YouTube filled with parodies.

And then everyone bought one. More than four million Snuggies sold by the end of 2009, a lot of them as gag gifts that quietly became actual couch equipment, because the dumb thing worked. The joke became a phenomenon with its own gravity: Snuggie pub crawls appeared in multiple cities, and in 2010, baseball-stadium crowds set Guinness World Records for the most people wearing fleece blankets at once. Predecessors existed — the Slanket, the Freedom Blanket — but the Snuggie's perfectly ridiculous commercial made it the household name. Years later the FTC fined Allstar over the fees buried in that buy-one-get-one offer, a footnote that dented nothing.

The Snuggie is the purest artifact of a certain 2000s ritual: the As-Seen-On-TV product America bought ironically and kept sincerely.