Forty Years, Three Generations and the Pricing Mistake They Keep Seeing
Forty Years, Three Generations and the Pricing Mistake They Keep Seeing
Somewhere in Louisville, Kentucky there is a building where every bottle of HI-FLOAT has been made for the last four decades. It has never traveled more than five miles from where it started, which was a garage that belonged to Andrea's parents. Her mom was a balloon artist who noticed helium balloons didn't last. Her dad was a chemical engineer who fixed that. Another proud example of a family business in the balloon industry.
That story is charming on its own, but it isn't why I wanted them on the podcast together. Andrea and Philip run a company, a marriage and now a third generation of employees; and they spend the year traveling to teach classes, which means they watch hundreds of us price our work out loud. That vantage point is rare, and what they see is worth paying attention to.
The market changed and a lot of us haven't
Ten or fifteen years ago the balloon world was decorator driven. Someone wanting balloons for a birthday didn't have many options besides you. That's over. Now there's a retail aisle in every direction, and Andrea was blunt about what that means; you are not going to win on price against a big box store, so stop trying.
What you can win on is everything a store can't sell. Your creativity. The relationship. The feeling that someone is being taken care of on a day that matters to them. Materials are a small line item compared to the value you're actually delivering, and pricing like the materials are the product is how you end up underpaid.
The math nobody wants to do
Phillip said that when they teach HI-FLOAT classes they build in a little pricing conversation, and it is consistently eye opening; a lot of people have never fully run their own numbers.
Two specific gaps came up:
- Prices set a year ago that never got revisited, even though supply costs have moved a lot
- Air-only decorators skipping helium entirely because it feels expensive
They expanded on how the second one is a real money leak. A helium-filled 11" balloon might cost around $1.50 in materials and sell for $6-7 dollars. Half the room says they can't charge that; the other half of the room says they charge it every single time and get it. Plus, the truth is, helium accents also read as professional in a way that pure air deliveries sometimes don't... frankly, customers expect us to have helium.
Building things slowly on purpose
HI-SHINE took more than twenty years to arrive as their second product, and Philip resisted it for a while. The existing option on the market required wiping with a glove, and he didn't want to knock off someone else's idea just to have something new on the shelf. It launched only once it did something genuinely better; it spreads on its own.
That's a useful reminder for anyone rushing to add offers. Putting your name on something you aren't sure about costs more than waiting.
Working together without losing the marriage
I'll be honest: their approach surprised me. There are no boundaries around talking about work; they'll be discussing it at 11pm. The boundaries live somewhere else entirely, in the division of expertise. "These are your calls, these are mine, and we trust each other to make them."
Self-described as two stubborn firstborns, with twenty eight years of marriage, and still in business together... it works because somebody is always clearly the decision maker for the thing being decided.
Go listen to the whole conversation, including the lightning round where Phillip shares the HI-FLOAT trick she's been teaching all summer.
