Zach Gosciminski in his workshop.
By Ed Avis
Zach Gosciminski was 19 years old in 2013 when he saw Making Monsters, a program on the Travel Channel that follows the work at a Halloween animatronics company. The Halloween-loving teen was enchanted.
“I was like, ‘Oh, I want to do that,'” he remembers. He went into the basement of his parents home and started experimenting with clay and hydrocal casting material. His first successful project was a handful of dismembered fingers. That eventually led to hands, limbs and torsos.
“I learned the basics from the show, and then I reached out to other people in the industry,” he says. “I learned what paint sticks to latex, for example, and got input from a lot of people.”
Once Gosciminski had some products that he felt were good enough to sell, he reached out to a few retailers to gauge their interest. One that responded was Halloween Asylum, which had a large warehouse/retail space in Indian Orchard, New York, which was not far from Gosciminski’s home.
“I met with them and started doing custom work for them,” he explains. “They started carrying my stuff wholesale and they showed me the ropes of the Halloween business, all the way down to how to program your printer so you can do labels.”
That marked the beginning of Gosciminski’s business, Creepy Twists.
“I worked in a banquet hall when I started the company, so I had a lot of free time during the week,” Gosciminski says. “I always loved Halloween, so the business naturally grew from there.”
Zach Gosciminski making faces
He eventually added a few other retailer customers, and sold some products on Etsy. Then in 2017 he learned that Halloween Asylum was going out of business. He had rented some space next to their warehouse and was very familiar with their business, so he bought the company’s name and web address.
“I took it over and scaled it down a bit, and started working with some other suppliers like FunWorld, Morris and Ghoulish,” he explains. “Now we sell products year-round.”
Gosciminski joined the NCA last year and plans to grow his retail business. He still makes his own custom products as well, but not in enough quantity to sell to other retailers at this time. Though he does make some custom Halloween items – such as a giant foam jack-o-lantern -- for Six Flags Fright Fest, where he also is employed painting the cars for rides.
“It’s still kind of a side business for me, but it’s definitely my passion project,” he says of his Halloween product manufacturing. “I gravitate to anything scary, anything Halloween.”