Holiday Light Saver (Tangle-Free Christmas Lights Storage System) – A Marketing Review

For most people, late November and early December means that it’s time to haul the Christmas (errr, holiday) decorations out of the attic, basement, or garage, and to then decorate the house in an appropriate manner.

It’s fun, it’s entertaining, it helps spread the Christmas spirit (HOLIDAY!  I really meant to say holiday spirit.  Really.), and the larger number of lights that you use means the bigger your manhood.  Or something like that.  Whatever it really means, we all know that the more decorative lights that you use, then that much more time will be required to keep them all neatly stored and organized.

That’s what brings us here today.

For most people, the biggest problem with decorating for Christmas (Dang it.  That should really be “. . . decorating for the holidays“) is simply dealing with the Christmas lights (Holiday lights!!!  I should really pay more attention to my typing!  Somebody has probably become offended at this point.)  In January it’s very easy to pull down the lights and simply toss them into a plastic tub with the other strands of lights.  They’re then forgotten until late November when it’s time to decorate the house again.  That’s when we realize just how much we’ve forgotten that it’s actually frustrating and time consuming to untangle all of those strands of colorful lights.

Bob Rivers – “The Twelve Pains of Christmas” – original music video

It’s no wonder that “Rigging up the lights!” ranks as the second “pain” of Christmas in Bob Rivers‘s classic Christmas comedy song, “The Twelve Pains of Christmas.”  Sometimes it’s challenging enough just to hang up the lights *without* trying to untangle them.  Good grief!

Anyway, depending on your methods of organization and/or storage, dealing with the Christmas lights (HOLIDAY lights!  I’ll get it right at some point.) can be a breeze or a royal pain in the Arsch.  It’s just a matter of time before somebody, somewhere, creates a new method of storing those dang lights, a method that will (hopefully) make it so much quicker and easier to deal with the lights.

What’s this?

The Holiday Light Saver?

Can this really be the answer to the problem of figuring out an effective way of storing Christmas lights (Whoops!  I really meant to say holiday lights.  Honest.)?

an older TV commercial for the Holiday Light Saver

Let’s take a look and review the advertising for the Holiday Light Saver.  In this case we’ll be using the TV commercial on display at the product’s website (www.HolidayLightSaver.com).  Does this look like a useful product, or does it look more like a scam?

The advertisement for the Holiday Light Saver begins with an image of a house covered with Christmas lights.  At least, I’m assuming that we’re looking at Christmas lights here.  Neither the advertisement or the website specifically mentioned *Christmas* lights, but rather “holiday” lights.  Since this doesn’t really look like a Hanukkah or Kwanzaa display, I’m going to take a wild guess and say that it’s most likely for Christmas.

Anyway, using lights is a common way to decorate your home for the holidays.  It’s festive.  It’s fun.  And at night they usually look great.

But for many people, there’s a tiny little problem when it comes to Christmas (Yeah, I know, I know.  Holiday.) lights . . .

They usually get tangled together if they’re not properly stored.

At one time or another we’ve all been in this situation.  In January we’ve taken down the decorations, thrown them into assorted boxes, and then proceeded to forget about our sloppy storage skills for the next ten months.  When it’s time to gather the decorations again in November or December, suddenly we remember that we forgot to put a little effort in packaging the lights when we last used them.  After all, why work now when you can always put it off until later?

It’s just like that fable involving the grasshopper who laughed at the ants for working so hard.

All summer long the ants worked and gathered food for the upcoming winter.  The grasshopper sat back and laughed at them, thinking that they could have saved all of that work until later.  Food will always be around, right?  When winter finally arrived and those external sources of food wilted away, the grasshopper was hungry and very jealous of the ants as they partied and ate from their plentiful food storage.  My, how the tables have turned!

The grasshopper then starved to death, its final thoughts questioning why it never put a little bit of effort into preparing for the future.  Several days later, a human being stepped on the ant mound, causing the ants to flee and panic.  The human then used a magnifying glass to focus the sunshine and fry the ants, burning them to a crisp one after another.  As the ants incinerated from the intensified sunshine and fled in panic, their cries for help were heard from a nearby scorpion.  The scorpion raced to the human being, scrambled up its leg, and then stung the person through the pants.

However, the scorpion’s deadly poison worked a little too quickly.  The human being suddenly collapsed on top of the remains of the ant hill, killing the scorpion as well as a thousand more ants.  When other human beings found the deceased body of their colleague a few moments later, they used rakes and shovels to level that entire patch of ground.  Gasoline was then poured into the loose soil, allowed to saturate, and then ignited by a match.  The humans got their revenge against the insects.

In the end, all of the insects that lived in that patch of ground were dead.  There were no more ants, no more grasshoppers poking fun at the ants, and no more scorpions who raced to the rescue of the ants.  They were all dead, all because a grasshopper sat back and laughed while the ants worked hard to prepare for the future.  Meanwhile, the humans drank an entire keg of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer in honor of their fallen colleague.  When the snow and ice finally melted for good the following spring, the humans replanted that burned patch of land, allowing nature to flourish once again.

What were we talking about before the insect story?

Oh yeah, the advertisement for the Holiday Light Saver.

Before the exciting fable involving a grasshopper, ants, a heroic scorpion, and a keg of cheap American beer, we were discussing how it can be difficult for people to take the time to properly store their decorative lights.  But untangling the improperly stored lights can lead to frustration.  Prolonged moments of frustration can lead to anger.  A high level of anger can lead to drastic actions such as taking those tangled lights and throwing them into the trash can.

Wait.  What?

That’s what happens in the TV commercial for the Holiday Light Saver.  The woman gets so frustrated with not being able to untangle her lights, so she just takes the lights and throws them right into the trash can.  Instead of taking a few moments and using those logic skills first used in preschool, the woman decides to simply throw away the lights and, presumably, starting over by purchasing a brand new set of decorative lights.

Of course, this wouldn’t be an as-seen-on-TV commercial without people exaggerating and overreacting to the simplest of problems.  Do you really think that an average person would simply throw away a perfectly good set of Christmas lights, only because they cannot take a minute to untangle them?  That’s like going out and purchasing a new set of shoes because one of your shoelaces broke, instead of simply replacing the shoelace.

So how can people find an easier way to store their decorative lights?

Is there a quick and easy way to prevent them from becoming tangled?  Or are we all doomed to dealing with tangled strands of lights?

The Holiday Light Saver?  Can it really be a beacon of hope for all of those people challenged by properly storing their decorative lights?

In this stunning display we get to see just how quick it is to feed a strand of Christmas lights (Oh crap!  It’s supposed to be holiday lights.  For some reason I just cannot stop referring to them as Christmas lights.) through the Holiday Light Saver.  In a way, it reminds me of those days of working back at the sausage factory.  Just feed the [insert whatever term you want, preferably something that uses excessive profanity] into the plastic sleeve and keep on pulling.  Of course, this time we’re not forming sausage links, but rather using an alternate method to store decorative strands of lights.

Oh man, that talk about sausage sounds pretty good right now.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll throw some bratwurst on the grill.  Mmmmm, fresh bratwurst.

The advertisement reminds us that by using the Holiday Light Saver, we’ll “. . . never have to untangle lights again!”  Whew!  That’s a relief.  Now I can spend more time planning my festivities rather than fretting and losing sleep over the thought of some of my decorative light strands being tangled.

Just insert an end of the strand of lights into the Holiday Light Saver, and pull it through the plastic sleeve.  When you get to the end of the strand of lights, stop pulling.  Oddly enough, it’s not mentioned what you’re supposed to do after that point.  Should you trim the plastic sleeve?  Should you attach a second strand of lights to the end of the first one, and then keep pulling it through the Holiday Light Saver?  Are you supposed to use the entire plastic sleeve for a single strand of lights?

We know that the product comes with a plastic sleeve that’s 100 feet long.  Perhaps the instruction manual has tips for dealing with short strands of lights, because it’s certainly not discussed in the TV commercial or on the product’s website.

Here’s the most important selling feature of the Holiday Light Saver.  When using the product properly, the strands of lights cannot catch on themselves or other strands, and not get tangled.  The plastic sleeve prevents the lights from becoming ensnared or tangled with other strands of lights.

But what about those pesky icicle lights?  Can the Holiday Light Saver help prevent them from becoming tangled?

Sure enough, the advertisement claims that not even icicle lights are a problem for the Holiday Light Saver.  Just feed them through the plastic sleeve like any other strand of lights.  That’s it.  Allegedly the strand of icicle lights will not be tangled, or, at least, they’ll be much less tangled than if they were simply tossed into a box along with other lights and decorations.

The plastic sleeves are flexible and allow you to coil the strands of lights and toss them into a storage container.  Coiling the lights is nothing new.  You’ve probably done that a thousand times by now.  The difference is that now the lights are inside of a plastic sleeve, guaranteeing that they won’t get tangled with other strands of lights.  Doesn’t that sound so much more convenient and easier?  Or does your usual method of coiling the lights still work just fine?

On a side note, it’s rather amusing that the older version of the Holiday Light Saver TV commercial (the YouTube video near the top of the article) tells us not to coil our lights “. . . the old way,” yet we’re meant to coil the lights once they’re covered with the Holiday Light Saver’s plastic sleeve.  However, if you were to *correctly* coil the lights “the old way” without the plastic sleeve, then you won’t have to deal with tangled strands of lights.

Perhaps what the advertisers are really telling us is that no matter what, we’re supposed to coil the strands of lights, but *only* doing so after covering them with the plastic sleeve from the Holiday Light Saver.  Yeah, that sounds about right.

According to the TV commercial, it’s incredibly easy to slide the strand of lights out of the plastic sleeve.  Then again, this ain’t rocket science.  The commercial then makes it a point of mentioning that when using the product, you’ll always know where to quickly find the end of the lights.  If finding the end of the strand of lights has been a constant problem for you, perhaps you have some greater issues and shouldn’t be around power outlets.

The marketers want us to think about how much faster it’ll be for us to decorate lights on our Christmas tree when using the Holiday Light Saver.  Since when decorating the house became a race against the clock?

I can just picture a scenario now.

– Mom – “Here’s the tree.  We’ve only got ten minutes to decorate it.  Put on the lights before adding the ornaments.”

– child – “Why are we in such a rush, Mommy?  Aren’t we supposed to have fun while decorating it?”

– Mom – “It’s because we didn’t plan ahead.  We can have fun later.  Now move it!  Move, move, move, move, move!”

Of course, you can save even more time when using a pre-lit artificial Christmas tree.  Or, better yet, just leave your decorations up year-round.  Why keep rigging and removing the external lights when you can simply leave them on the house throughout the year?  Think of how jealous your neighbors will be when all you have to do to decorate for the holidays is simply flip a switch.  You’ll be inside the house drinking hot chocolate while watching reruns of Rudolph and Frosty, and they’re outside untangling lights, messing around on ladders, and braving the elements.

The TV commercial then goes on and says that not only does the plastic sleeve help protect the lights, but it’ll also allow you to store them in half the amount of space.  But half the space of what?  How are the people making this comparison?

If you’ve been having problems with tangled lights, then I’m going to take a wild guess and say that you keep your strands of lights together and in a single container.  That means that you’re not storing them in separate containers, such as their original boxes.  So if you’re just tossing them all together, whether your method is neat or disorganized, how in the world is the Holiday Light Saver going to help you ” . . . store in half the space”?

Technically, adding a plastic sleeve is going to require a slightly larger amount of space required to store each strand of lights.  If you’re storing your lights “loose” (like the majority of people), then it’s going to be virtually impossible to reduce your amount of storage space needed, especially to reduce it by half the required amount.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, if you’re somebody who keeps your Christmas lights in their original boxes, then having tangled lights is not a problem.  If anything, your biggest problem is taking the time to re-package all of the lights when you take down the decorations until it’s time to use them again.  If you choose to take the time to do that much extra work re-packaging the lights, then you may not be that concerned about the extra amount of space it takes to store the lights in their original packaging.  Of course, that extra amount of space is really negligible since it’s very easy to stack and store the light boxes.

The reality is that this is a BOGUS claim by the marketing department.  The “Store In Half The Space!” claim only works under certain situations, but it’s never clarified.  This is just an exaggerated selling feature that most likely will not apply to the majority of the product’s customers.

• If you’re somebody who likes to keep the lights in their original boxes (or some other type of individual packaging), then you’re neat and orderly, and chances are likely that the Holiday Light Saver is not a product for you.

– OR –

• If you’re somebody who just tosses the strands of lights into a box with other strands of lights, then you *might* have tangled lights, but your method keeps the required amount of space at a minimum.  Thus, the Holiday Light Saver will most likely NOT allow you to further reduce the amount of space needed to store your lights, especially with its outrageous claim of helping you “Store In Half The Space!”

So which way is it?

Besides strands of decorative lights, what else can you store with the help of the Holiday Light Saver?

The commercial informs us that we can also use the product to pack and protect “delicate garland” in addition to the lights.  Tell me, just how does the flexible plastic sleeve help protect garland versus gently storing it in its own container?  When the garland is just sitting in a container for ten or eleven months of the year, it’ll be just as susceptible to the extreme heat and cold in your attic or storage area whether or not it’s wrapped in a plastic sleeve.  A thin layer of plastic adds very little insulation for protecting against extreme temperatures.

However, the real danger to the garland occurs when it’s physically being moved while decorating and removing the decorations.  The goal is to be gentle with the garland and to move it as little as possible, helping to make sure that it’ll look nice for the next year.  Does going through the motions of wrapping the garland with the Holiday Light Saver really help protect the garland?  Or is your garland just as protected when you gently store it in a separate container?

The advertisement also claims “. . . no more messy shedding” in regards to the garland.  Again, the primary factors working against the garland decorations are age (measured in years) and movements (each time you set up, adjust, and remove the decorations).  No matter what, as your garland ages over the years, it’s going to become more frail and more prone to breaking and shedding its needles.

If you use the plastic sleeve with the Holiday Light Saver, is it really helping to protect your garland and allowing it to be used for a little while longer?  Or is it more of a way of collecting the needles when they fall off the garland, keeping the mess to a minimum?

The Holiday Light Saver can also be used to help store decorative lights for other holidays such as Independence Day and Halloween.  This product is being marketed as something that can be used year-round, and not just for [insert a major decorative holiday here].

Is it just me, or does it look like the party lights used in this example look like they would be extremely simple to store?  How hard would it be to get those lights tangled?  Or, if they should get tangled, how hard would it be to take thirty or even sixty seconds to untangle them?

I’m going to take a wild guess and say that if you have separate decorative lights that are used for specific times of the year (parties, celebrations, acquittals, obscure holidays, etc.), then you most likely store those lights in a separate container rather than with your Christmas / Hanukkah / Kwanzaa / New Year’s decorations.  That being said, it’s also quite unlikely that those special occasion lights are going to be tangled and a jumbled mess unless you have really poor organization skills.

If your organization skills are that bad, I’m sure some nearby elementary school kids can give you a hand.

The end of the Holiday Light Saver TV commercial has the super special promotion.  If we act now and use the promotion in the commercial and on the product’s website, then we can get an extra 100 feet of storage sleeves for free.  All we have to do is pay a little bit extra in shipping and handling.

However, the promotion looks different on the product’s website.  It’s not exactly clear though just how much is included in the promotion.

The website lists the promotion as “Buy One Set, Get One Free!”  It shows a double image of the Holiday Light Saver and the bonus 100-foot segment of plastic sleeves.  Are we to assume (Yeah, yeah.  I know all about assumptions.) that the Holiday Light Saver and bonus set of plastic sleeves equals one “set,” and we’re to receive two of those “sets” with the online promotion?

Nowhere does it state the length of the plastic sleeve that comes with the Holiday Light Saver.  All it mentions is that the extra set of plastic sleeves is 100 feet long.  We’re to assume that the plastic sleeves already included with the Holiday Light Saver device is also 100 feet long.  But again, we have to assume because it does not mention the length of it anywhere in the commercial or on the website.  What we do know is that the advertising states several times that this product is good for strands of lights up to 100 feet long.

Just how many plastic sleeves are included in a set?  How much do we receive in the buy-one-get-one-free promotion?

Are we to believe that a “set” equals 200 total feet of plastic sleeves (100 feet with the Holiday Light Saver plus 100 extra feet of plastic sleeves included for free), and the “Buy One Set, Get One Free!” has a TOTAL of 400 feet of plastic sleeves?

That’s how the promotion looks on the product’s website.  Nowhere does it state exactly how much of the product you’re supposed to receive.  Either the marketers are lazy, they’re trying to hide something, or they’re trying to mislead you.  Take your pick.

The TOTAL COST of the Holiday Light Saver promotion costs $26.85 ($14.95 + $5.95 S&H + $5.95 S&H (for the “free” set)).  The only mystery is how many plastic sleeves you’ll be receiving.

Take note that the ‘Process Order‘ / ‘Order Now!” button PLACES A LIVE ORDER!  There is NO confirmation screen before confirming that you want to proceed with the order.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Just how difficult is it to store Christmas lights, or any other holiday or party lights, without tangling them?

That’s the bottom line here.

If you have any sort of organizational skills, then you won’t have a problem with storing strands of decorative lights.  If, for some reason, your lights should become tangled, then it’s not difficult to untangle them.  Just spread them out, use some extremely basic reasoning and logic skills, and you’ll easily figure out how to untangle them.  This is nowhere near as difficult as tying your shoes, or staying inside of the lines when coloring with crayons.

I like to coil my strands of lights to store them neatly.  You can use plastic tie wraps to hold it together, or just keep wrap the ends of the strand together to keep the coil from falling apart.  Another way to easily store lights is to collect plastic grocery bags and then keep an entire strand inside of its own plastic bag.  This prevents the lights from tangling with other strands, and by reusing plastic grocery bags you’re helping to save the Earth (Remember to reduce, reuse and recycle!  Or Smokey the Bear is going to have a word with you!).

But that’s just me.  You probably have your own ways of storing your decorations.  What we’re really doing here is talking about the ADVERTISING in the commercial and how the product is being presented to the general public.

While the TV commercial easily shows us the concept behind the Holiday Light Saver, it fails in educating us about how to get the most out of this product.

First of all, neither the commercial or the website show us how to handle strands of lights (or garland) less than 100 feet long.  The vast majority of interior decorative lights are between 20-60 feet long.  That being said, is there an easy way to trim the plastic sleeves so that they’ll fit our common strands of lights?  Can we then use an adhesive like tape to attach the remaining plastic sleeve to the next roll, so the leftover plastic doesn’t go to waste?

What about re-using the plastic sleeve after you remove the lights?  Is it easy to bunch the sleeve together and re-attach it to the Holiday Light Saver device?  If people are disorganized / lazy enough to constantly have tangled lights, are they going to be able the basic skills required to re-attach the plastic sleeve so it can be used again?

Or is this a case where if you’re able to think ahead and ask questions like that, then this product really isn’t meant for you?

As far as the marketing goes, there’s also the question of the product’s name — HOLIDAY LIGHT SAVER.

I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that “light saver” is very close to “lightsaber,” the laser-like swords made famous in the Star Wars movies.  People are going to hear that part of the name and pay a little more attention to the commercial.  Take a look at the top of the product’s website and see how “light saver” is written in green (not only a Christmas color but also one of the lightsaber colors used in Star Wars), but it’s also tilted at an angle.

It could just be me, but that part of the name looks like it’s trying to cash in on the Star Wars movies, especially since there’s a ton of buzz about them right now.

There’s also the issue of the advertising referring to the lights as “holiday” lights, and not calling them CHRISTMAS lights like the vast majority of people do.  Nowhere on the product’s website will you find the word “Christmas.”  In the TV commercial, you only hear Christmas mentioned once when the narrator is talking about decorating a Christmas tree.  Otherwise, it’s just holiday, holiday, holiday.  That’s political correctness for you.

As far as the Holiday Light Saver, that’s dependent upon you and your organization skills.  Just remember that some organization skills are still needed when using this product correctly.

———————-

All of the Holiday Light Saver commercial images are screenshots of a TV commercial currently available on product’s website.  For more product information, please visit the company’s website at www.HolidayLightSaver.com.

Holiday Light Saver is a registered trademark.

RellimZone.com is not affiliated with Holiday Light Saver.