Reaching outside of your balloon boundaries
Lizeth and Oscar of Mom's Kloset started in 2017 with a bag of balloons. Now, they've pushed their boundaries beyond balloons and are doing three-day weddings with a full ceiling flip overnight. And they shipped a container of custom builds to St. Martin.
I was fangirling the entire time I talked to them at IBC. And honestly, what I found most inspiring wasn't the scale of what they've built; it was how they got there.
They Didn't Have a Plan. They Had a Process.
They just kept saying yes to things they hadn't done before, figured them out and eventually looked back to see what had accumulated. That's not a lack of strategy, it's a different kind of strategy. One that stays open to opportunities instead of locking in a lane too early.
Oscar, who came from a background building commercial cabinets, brings the fabrication know-how. Lizeth brings the creative vision, the client relationships and apparently the courage to say yes to a shipping container headed to the Caribbean. Together they've built a business where balloons and fabrication feed each other, especially helpful when clients don't want to manage five vendors.
The First Step Outside Balloons
For Lizeth, it started with fringe. A client planning a quinceañera sent inspiration photos of something sparkly and silver. Lizeth had never done a fringe ceiling before. She said yes anyway, figured it out and the client loved it.
That's how almost everything they do now started.
Someone asks if they've done something. Lizeth says no, but if you trust us, we can figure it out. Most of the time, the client says yes... and they make it happen.
It's worth sitting with that for a second. Not pretending to have experience you don't have, but being honest about where you are while still believing in your ability to get there. That combination of transparency and confidence is rare, and it's a big part of why their clients keep coming back with bigger and wilder ideas.
What They'd Tell You to Add First
I asked Lizeth directly: for someone who's just doing balloons right now, what would you recommend they start with?
Her answers were practical and specific.
Backdrops and rental arches. A good 3D arch or ripple wall gets rented over and over again. You repaint it, you refresh it and it keeps earning. She suggests starting here.
Silk florals. She started with just a few stems tucked into balloon designs. Now she's doing full extravagant floral installations. The confidence came from doing it small first and building from there. Clients couldn't tell the difference between silk and real floral, which meant the bar for getting started was lower than she expected.
Fringe, but start small. Fringe ceilings look effortless in photos. They are not. Every ceiling is different, and rigging is its own skill entirely. Lizeth's advice: add fringe to a small balloon install first, get comfortable with the material and let the scale grow naturally from there.
The thread through all of it is the same: start smaller than you think you need to, build your confidence and let the jobs get bigger as you do.
On Hiring
Mom's Kloset has six full-time people now: Lizeth, Oscar, his parents and two others they've brought on more recently. But getting there wasn't easy.
Their approach to hiring is to test people before committing. Give them a small project and see how they show up. They don't look for perfection, but initiative. They said the people who are always looking for the next thing to do without being told, always trying to figure out how to help... those are the ones worth training. The ones who stand around waiting for direction are, well, a different conversation.
The first hire is the hardest because you don't have a system for it yet. Testing before committing is a low-stakes way to find out who someone actually is on the job.
The Mindset That Makes It Work
I asked them if they're ever scared going into a new project. Lizeth said yes, every time... it's just her personality. But then she does it anyway.
They've never told a client they couldn't get something done. Has everything come out exactly how she envisioned? No... but it got done, the client was happy and she always learns something for the next one.
Hear my full conversation with this amazing couple on The Bright Balloon podcast, episode 414.
