Evolution of a balloon website over 20 years:
About – David Saker
UPDATE 2023 – After getting though the lockdown years all sides of my business are seeing growth. This sounds good but the main reason is because everything is open (nobody wants a balloon arch over a closed shop). The most important area of growth for me is The Virtual Balloon Race. I’ve branched out into Duck Races and month after month more people are embracing virtual fundrasing.
UPDATE 2020 – With COVID disruptions to the events industry in 2020 I switched from real balloons to 100% virtual balloons. The balloon race was developed in 2008 and had minimal updates for 12 years. Increased demand in 2020 led to 6 months of constant updates – which led to more demand and eventually a new backend database and faster server to help with scalability going forward.
The short answer to all of the below is – “The only constant in business is change”.
I started working with balloons in 1982 at The Kite & Balloon Company in London. In 1989 I launched Balloon Attack in Birmingham (a very small decorating company) and later expanded buying Balloons ‘n’ Things (EST 1982), running & owning 2 retail shops when retail was good. In the 1990’s balloons were extremely popular at Weddings so business was rampant at the weekends.
In 1998 I took the simple idea of releasing balloons and expanded it to supply every School in the UK. This was the perfect small business for a while as I only stocked 3 items – 10″ Balloons, Race Labels & release nets (the helium was delivered direct from BOC). Everything went well until releasing balloons was pretty much banned in 2008.
In 2006 I launched PrintedBalloons.com. A website where you could design your own balloons live online. The site was extremely good to me for 4 years. Unfortuantly it was built using FLASH which was phased out after the iPhone launch. This together with Google algorithm changes killed the site.
In 2008 I start The Virtual Balloon Race.
Other interesting adventures have involved floating a man, launching a camera to the edge of Space, my 10 arches in Windsor and filling the Haywood Gallery with balloons.