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Manitoba man's popular tweet prompts Leon's Furniture to change product name
A Manitoba man’s popular tweet resulted in Leon’s Furniture changing the name of one of its products.
On Saturday, Dylan MacKay, an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba in food and human nutritional sciences and endocrinology, tweeted a picture of a Leon’s storage ottoman that looks like a hippopotamus.
“The fact that this is not called a hippopottoman is a huge failure,” his tweet said.
MacKay said he got the idea for the tweet after seeing an ad for the piece of furniture and joking about it with his wife.
“That took off with lots of people having seen it now…my Twitter’s just been going crazy for the last couple of days,” he said in an interview on Tuesday.
MacKay noted he’s been receiving lots of hippo jokes, retweets and comments on the post, which has now garnered nearly 60,000 likes.
The tweet ended up gaining so much traction that even Leon’s caught wind of it and decided to take MacKay’s suggestion and change the name of the product to the hippopottoman.
“Hey Dylan, hip-hip-hooray. Hopefully, we aren’t a huge failure anymore,” the furniture store said in a tweet.
MacKay noted that Leon’s is sending him something following the success of his tweet.
“I don’t know what it is, but hopefully it’s a hippopottoman,” he said.
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