'Glowy Zoey' Outdoes Herself With Minnie Mouse Costume
Royce Hutain started a company from his daughter's Halloween costume
— -- If you are a parent feeling proud of the fact that you have your child’s Halloween costume together already, or, even better, that you made it yourself, then read with caution.
A father in California may have outdone all homemade Halloween costumes for the second year in a row.
Royce Hutain not only made a stickman LED Minnie Mouse suit for his toddler-age daughter, Zoey, but he created a company out of it too.
Glowy Zoey is Hutain’s Huntington, Calif.-based company that sells LED costumes for adults and kids.
The business started last year after Hutain unknowingly made his then 2-year-old daughter a Halloween celebrity by posting a short video of her on YouTube in the LED stickman suit he’d created for her on a whim, using extra parts he had from making LED suits for snowboarding at night.
The YouTube video received over 22 million views and put Hutain suddenly in the business of making LED stickman costumes.
“I never had any plans turning it into a business until the requests started coming in,” Hutain, who could not be reached today by ABC News, writes on the company’s website.
Zoey’s costume this year, which Hutain calls “version 2.0 Minnie Mouse edition,” is not yet available for sale but you can purchase the regular LED stickman suits in toddler, kids and adult sizes, all for under $100.
While Zoey makes the Minnie Mouse costume seem adorably simple, Hutain explains the science behind it on YouTube.
“The 2014 version is using digitally addressable LED strips hooked up to an Arduino microcontroller which I programmed (and still learning). It is responsive to sound and has 2 potentiometers and a button in the back of one of the ears for control and a microphone hidden in the front. It has 12 modes and 372 LEDs (124 chips with 3 each),” he writes in the video’s description.
Not to be outdone, Hutain says there is even more LED fun ahead for his company, beyond Oct. 31st.
“After the Halloween rush is over, we can focus on bringing you LED suits designed for more rigorous movement like night time 5k runs and festivals,” Hutain writes on his company’s website. “These suits will have features that sync with music or respond to your pulse.”