Face Painting and Balloon Twisting Blog

I am finding inventory control to be a challenge. Last week, I had to restock my bag of balloons for my weekend balloon twisting events and couldn’t find a single bag of purple balloons. I had every other color, just no purple.

For items with a relatively long shelf life, like canned goods, I usually keep 8-10 cans in my cabinets. My cabinets have the space and I really don’t have to worry about the food going bad before I eat it. I always back fill my cabinets (put the newest items behind the older items) which helps make sure that something doesn’t sit in the cabinet too long.

When it comes to balloons, I keep one bag of each color in a storage system in my living room where I restock my balloon bag. I keep the balloons organized in rainbow order so I can quickly find the color I want and I can see what colors I need. I keep the rest of the balloons in the basement. I have another bin in the basement that has my balloons in rainbow order. When I need a specific color, I will take it from the bin. I keep any other remaining balloon in the shipping box it came in. When the bin in the basement starts to run low, I will find the colors in the shipping box and move them into the bin. I usually know that when the shipping box is empty that it is time to order more balloons.

When I order balloons, I do an inventory and count the number of bags available for each color. I then try to guess which colors will be popular in the coming months (I buy extra red, white and blue for the 4th of July; black and orange before Halloween; and green, red and white for Christmas). I seem to use a lot of red/pink/purple balloons for the girls, green for both plant stems and aliens, and black and white for penguins.

I feel that I should try to keep a closer tab on my balloon supply. Although I can usually get more balloons within a few business days, I prefer to make a few large balloon orders instead of several smaller orders. Since I know which color balloons I buy, it shouldn’t be too hard for me to make a listing of balloons and cross off the bags as I go. That would give me a visual indicator when my stock is running low and a way of seeing the ratio of balloons used by color.

I know that I have some of the same problems with my stock of face paints. I don’t go through the paint nearly as fast and it takes a lot less space to store.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2012 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Balloon Twisting, Event, Face Painting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.