Balloons have held appeal for over a hundred years since they first appeared in the United States in 1907. By the early 1940s, Americans were twisting balloons into animal shapes. In the 1970s, foil balloons were introduced to the market and grew in popularity as they held their shape and conveyed messages like “Happy Birthday!” and “Congratulations!”
But one problem has stood the test of time: balloons are for kids, but kids have never been able to blow balloons up and tie them off on their own. Cue exhausted parents at birthday parties just trying to enjoy five minutes of adult conversation ending up spending the afternoon blowing up and tying off balloons for the tiny balloon enthusiasts in the room.
It’s worth it, of course – there’s nothing like seeing the joy on a child’s face – but one company has found a better way.
A new product makes the formerly impossible possible
“I have a video of my kid trying to tie a balloon off, and it’s a mess. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s struggling with it, he has it all tied around his hands and I think his thumb was all caught in there at some point. It gets out of his reach and there’s this look of disappointment on his face. I hand him the Balloonzeez, and all of a sudden he blows it up and the lightbulb goes off,” says Jason Cole, co-founder of Balloonzeez, a Washington-based company that’s revolutionizing the balloon industry with their innovative, patented technology.
“We actually solve a problem that has existed for 100 years that nobody has tackled,” Gerry Allard, Balloonzeez’s co-founder, adds.
Balloonzeez is a balloon with a simple valve that anyone, including kids, can easily blow up without needing to tie the balloon off. Balloonzeez holds air without leaking for up to a week, and can then simply be blown up again for reuse.
“These balloons don’t just replace balloons, they also give the kid a toy,” Cole adds. “It’s kind of an amazing revolution for them when you actually watch children play with them. My son just had his eleventh birthday the other day. There were five boys here and they spent two hours kicking these balloons around.”
The balloons actually have a different weight to them because of the valve that turns them into a fun toy. “When you hit them, it’s kind of like you’re hitting a volleyball or a balloon that isn’t a normal balloon. It doesn’t fly up and you can hit it in certain directions,” Cole explains.
There’s even a sport that’s growing overseas — balloon volleyball — that Balloonzeez has its eye on. Invented in 2019 and on the rise ever since, balloon volleyball is being considered for introduction to the Olympic Games as early as 2024 and has its own European championships. With the Balloonzeez’s heavier weight due to its valve technology, it’s the perfect balloon for games and sports of all kinds.
“In normal balloon volleyball, the balloon flies all over the place and you can’t really control it. Because of the weight of the valve, you can control the Balloonzeez balloon,” Allard sayes. “Kids can play balloon volleyball and it can actually be accurate. Same with soccer — kids can kick the balloon like a soccer ball, keep and it will drop back down for them.”
Revisiting an old idea
Allard started the company in the 1980s as a fifty-fifty partnership with another collaborator. Together, the pair marketed the product and sold it to several toy stores including KB Toys. But back then, the valve itself had a poor design that would leak sometimes. The company ended up going by the wayside when they weren’t able to get a patent or support a better design.
Thirty years later, Allard talked to his son, Paul Allard, and real estate business partner Cole, and asked them what they thought about revisiting the idea and redesigning the valve.
Paul was immediately on board and quickly recognized changes to the valve design that needed to be made. Cole, on the other hand, wasn’t sure.
“Our real estate company has been growing and doing quite well, so Jason wasn’t all that interested,” Allard explains. “So I said, okay, I’m going to give you some samples. Take them home, give them to your kids, and then decide.”
That night, Cole sent Allard a picture of his son blowing up the Balloonzeez and said, “I’m in.”
“That’s a perfect example,” Allard continues. “People don’t understand what Balloonzeez is even if I explain it to them or show them a sample, because it’s something new. But they give it to a kid and watch the kid blow it up, boom, all of a sudden they get it. Now it all makes sense and now they think it’s awesome.”
From there, the three started redesigning the valve. They worked on prototype after prototype with their manufacturer in China for months until they perfected the design. Now, Balloonzeez is easy to blow, holds the air every time, and holds the air for up to a week.
At Balloonzeez, it’s all about the kids
For Allard, the driving force behind Balloonzeez is the joy kids experience when blowing up the balloons. “It’s really cool to watch kids when you hand them the balloon, especially four, five, six-year-old kids. Their eyes light up. It’s just so cool when they actually blow it up and they see what they’ve done,” He says. “It continues to amaze me when I watch kids do that. That’s one of the things that’s been a driving force for me.”
Watching kids get excited when they blow the balloons up is also what’s kept Allard interested in revisiting Balloonzeez after his initial failures with the old design years ago. When his grandkids were in elementary school, he would go into their schools a couple of times a year with balloons and hand them out.
“I remember in one of my granddaughter’s classes, I took a bunch of balloons in and we handed them out to all the kids. Several kids were asking ‘can I have one for my brother? Can I have one for my sister?’ so we gave them all out and ran out of them. For me it’s always been about the excitement of watching kids blow them up and enjoy that so much. That’s why I decided years ago to revisit this idea at some point in the future,” Allard recalls.
Cole’s wife, a second-grade teacher, took balloons into her class at the end of the school year last year. “This is something different and the kids light up when they see it. These kids in my wife’s classroom just couldn’t get enough of them. They were sending us pictures of them in the summer playing with them,” Cole says.
He also enjoys being able to give kids a tool that they can be successful with when they’ve struggled with blowing up balloons in the past. “There’s something to be said about kids having tiny successes in life,” He says.
The vision for Balloonzeez moving forward
Balloonzeez is a simple solution to a problem that’s existed for a long time.
“You can imagine having a birthday party with your five or six-year-old, they’ve got ten kids there, and nobody can blow up the balloons. All the adults have to blow them up and tie them off. This way, with Balloonzeez, you can actually hand the kid their own balloon, they can blow it up themselves and play with it. It’s really quite revolutionary in that regard,” Allard says. “Since the market for balloons has been kids for 100 years, and kids have never been able to blow them up, this is a huge change to that problem.”
As Cole and the Allards continue to share their innovative new technology with kids around the world, they envision collaborating with balloon companies and toy companies as well as selling Balloonzeez direct to consumers on Amazon.
“This isn’t just a replacement for the balloon, it’s a toy for your kids that they’re going to have hours of fun with,” Cole continues. “That’s what we’re so excited about.”
