This South Milwaukee mom has turned her love of balloons into a growing custom décor business
Nilsa Arce-Masso loves balloons.
She keeps balloons at her home in South Milwaukee for months until they are fully deflated. “I am legitimately obsessed with balloons,” she said. “Just give me all the balloons.”
Arce-Masso said she’d done some balloon design for her four-year-old daughter and nephews on birthdays for about six or seven years.
“It was very much more simple decoration,” she said.
It was her brother who showed her she could turn her passion into a business when he exposed her to the broader balloon decorating community.
“It was my little heaven,” Arce-Masso said.
Scouring social media, she found many unique displays made only of balloons of various colors, sizes, shapes and quantities. Arce-Masso also took a few classes to help with her projects which she described as motivational trial and error.
“I honestly love it, it pushes me to keep going,” she said.
In April 2022 Masso Balloons Décor was born — and the business had to grow up fast.
That month her brother asked her to do a baby shower and “go big.” Soon after, once word got around about the business, Arce-Masso began getting calls for graduations and birthday arrangements.
“It’s been pretty busy,” she said. “I thought I would have more time to see where this goes but then within two weeks I’m booking. It was definitely a faster pace than I was expecting.”
Arce-Masso joked her fiancée and kids are “sick and tired of my balloons.”
“I make things and pop them if they aren’t how I want them to be,” she said, laughing.
Arce-Masso often takes inspiration from Pinterest
Inspiration for Arce-Masso comes from what the customer wants which often starts with ideas off Pinterest. She won’t replicate another person’s work but gives a concept her “own spin and own style.”
She makes mock-ups with an app and once it’s confirmed by the client she gets to work. Displays can be set up quickly or, say if she's designing pieces for seven rooms of a house, it can take over 18 hours.
Using various colors and styles of balloons, Arce-Masso has created everything from classic wedding arches to a tree made of 300 balloons of five different types that took over three hours to build. Some projects can take up to 600 balloons, she said.
Whether you have a birthday, gender reveal, retirement, wedding, quinceañera, or another event, Masso Balloons Décor can inflate it into something more.
Eventually Arce-Masso wants to expand and “do the balloons and add more to the balloons” such as other decoration mediums with her goal to “to grow until there’s no space to grow.”
“Hopefully it takes off and (I can) make it an actual full-time job,” Arce-Masso, a stay-at-home mom for the last year and a half, said. “I get to do something that I’ve always loved.”
The best way to contact Arce-Masso is through her Facebook page, Masso Balloons Décor, and on Instagram @massoballonsdecor.
Contact Erik S. Hanley at erik.hanley@jrn.com. Like his Facebook page and follow him on Twitter at @ES_Hanley.
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: South Milwaukee woman opens custom balloon decor business for events
