in 2006 office depot created one of the most influential consumer products ever — elf yourself.
maybe i am still wrapped up in the holiday craze, but i recently used it again and while watching my head on a dancing elf, i couldn’t stop thinking about how this website is still unfailingly funny + shareable + delightful, and has sustained success year over year.
elf yourself turned a niche use case into a viral marketing campaign that resonated with a core group of older users (did someone accidentally say product/market fit). the act of inserting personal images in a funny video designated for sharing became a social tradition that echoes the standards of content creation on any device with a front-facing camera these days.
its face-capture and motion-tracking capabilities were surprisingly ahead of its time in a mass consumer product. it nurtured this early idea of transforming a manipulated image of your face into an instantly shareable meme in your social network.
this somehow feels like the predecessor to snapchat’s success with face filters—face morphing, funny effects, sharing mechanisms—which then rippled across photo-first “story” creation & creative selfie-editing tools.
(dancing elf > rainbow puke)
this could also be a wildly festive misappropriation of internet history, but elf yourself is a living fossil of the web 2.0 days. despite its heavy seasonal usage, the fact that it has stood the test of time says a lot about it as a product.
that and the nearly 2 billion elves that have been created since its inception.