We have had retail starter kits on our website for a while now, these are great packages for anyone wanted to start getting into the balloon and party industry as they contain everything you need to start selling balloons right away. You get a range of best-selling balloons lines, a spinner to show them off, ribbon, weights and of course Helium! If you don’t know where to start with balloons and want to save some money at the same time, head over to our website to find out more here.
But we are not here to talk about those! We decided to put a challenge to our very good friend and star of BMTV Mark Drury from Qualatex, to come up with a Qualatex starter kit with the following conditions:
• Couldn’t take up too much space
• Balloons had to be on-trend
• Set-up costs under £1000
Mark set out on this challenge and based it on their 48-peg spinner with multiple balloons on each peg. Mark wanted to include a complete package of everything you would need to get started. He wanted to included latex, foil and bubble balloons to give your customers a nice variety of products. He also wanted to included best-selling balloons, age ranges and licensed product balloons. He also included helium and helium accessories that you would need. So, it was quite a challenge, but we think Mark has created a really useful package. To see more, click here.
Mark worked out that if you sold the balloons in their simplest form, just a single balloon on a ribbon, they you can double your initial investment costs if you sell all the balloons. But you won’t want to be selling out of all your designs and have and empty spinner. This starter kit really is a “starter kit” for selling balloons with the intention to re-stock the items you are getting low on. This makes it a nice little continuous revenue stream that you can add to your existing shop.
But! You don’t just want to be selling the balloons singularly on their own! You can make a nice health margin from selling the balloons as a package. Mark has taken this into account and picked coordinating balloons in latex and foil. For instance, dots are quite big right now so he chose to include this Happy Birthday dot foil and these Dot latex to coordinate.
![](https://www.balloonmarket.co.uk/wpblog/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/49496-opt.jpg)
![](https://www.balloonmarket.co.uk/wpblog/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/17919-500.jpg)
As an example if you were to sell the foil on it’s own you would get £3.99 for it, but if you were to coordinate it into a mixed foil and latex bouquet you would be able to sell that for £17.99. What’s important is you’ve not only sold it at a higher price but also your margins on a product like this are increased over a single foil balloon. So you will make more money.
Large 34 inch numbers are also included in the kit, these are great for people’s birthdays and you can get around £9.99 for one of these on it’s own, if you were to spend a little extra time adding a collar and personalising the balloon with Vinyl, you can now make around £15.99!
If you were to sell a bubble on it’s own you would get around £7.99 for it, but if you were to just add a collar you would make £8.99 and it just looks so much nicer, even though you’ve not invested a great deal more time or money.
The next example is this large crown foil shape. On it’s own it would fetch around £11.99, but adding 3 Happy Birthday foils in a bouquet means that you now sell it for around £23.99. So you can see that adding the designs together and coordinating the balloons that you sell, you will be able to make a lot more profit for your business.
So there you go! Some tips on how to make more money with balloons and a great starter kit from the one and only Mark Drury! Let us know how you get on with the starter kit and we hope it grows into a great revenue stream for you!
Rob
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