Party City ceo Brad Weston spoke about this year’s Christmas celebrations being ‘all about the balloons’ in an online video interview with Yahoo Finance Live, also revealing that Party City is planning on opening a number of new balloon-focused stores in 2021.
The conversation focused initially on Party City’s better-than-expected Q3 and Halloween results, which were announced last week, with Brad pointing out that consumers are changing how they celebrate.
Brad went on to explain that balloons typically represent about 20% of Party City’s business, and that sales have held up this year, despite the ongoing pandemic.
“As you can imagine, in this period of time in a pandemic with consumers celebrating differently we have seen our core categories like balloons, birthday and entertaining really being some of our biggest growth drivers,” he said. “I have been pretty upfront that balloons are performing well, and they are part of both our short-term and long-term strategy.”
The interview went on to reveal that Party City is expected to open several new prototype stores in 2021 that will place a greater emphasis on balloons, placing them at the ‘epicentre’ of the store and in doing so offering a ‘next-generation’ shopping experience.
Brad was also asked whether the store portfolio, which has dropped from 843 to 739 over the past year, is likely to decrease further in the future.
“We are constantly engaged in rigorous analysis at the store level and the market level… and that will always result in store openings, store relocations and store closures. [We] look at what the consumer needs and see where demand is – as an omni-channel retailer that believes in both bricks-and-mortar and digital to fulfill party experiences, we feel fine with our store base today, but we’re constantly looking at it.”
