Local business provided ballons for Macy’s Parade

Posted in: Community News Events on November 30, 2010 at 10:40 am |

By Joe Lepore

Life O’ The Party celebrates 30 years of continuous business in Hackensack, and provides Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade with 15,000 Latex Balloons. October 31^st marked the thirtieth anniversary for a company that was only intended to be temporary.

After graduating from Ithaca College with a Music and Education degree, Company founder and owner, Mark Zettler worked as a band director in upstate NY until returning to Paramus to seek work as a professional musician. Mr. Zettler took a job delivering singing telegrams to supplement his income.

“The company was located in Queens and I had to drive back and forth, so after a while of doing that I decided to open my own company in NJ.”

What started out as a small singing telegram business in his parent’s home in Paramus, has inflated (ha, pun intended) into one of the world’s largest balloon decorating businesses. After continually growing his business and out-growing his parents home, Mr. Zettler decided to settle down and make Hackensack, not only his place of business, but his home as well.

“I was newly married and my wife and I thought Hackensack would be an ideal community to start a family.”

Twenty -Eight years later he and wife Andrea (who is chief Artistic Director) have two beautiful children and a long list of satisfied (and loyal) customers. Currently at their 4th location in Hackensack on Sussex Street, they have a complete production facility.

Besides inflating and decorating with balloons, Life O’ The Party is a complete party decorating company. They design and build custom sets for private events of all levels.

As the excitement and anticipation grew for the main event – the parade, all attention focused on the big picture of giant floats and famous cartoon characters, however, quietly behind the scenes workers prepared to add the little details which make the parade an extravaganza. For more than eight years Mr. Zettler and his highly skilled, dedicated team have been providing the balloons that decorate the parade route – from the inflation station on the Upper West Side, to the reviewing stand in front of Macy’s.

I stopped by to see what it takes to have 15,000 balloons ready in time. They use 11” latex balloons and need close to 25 helium tanks to inflate, approximately 90,000 feet of ribbon to tie them, and twelve highly skilled, nimble-fingered, balloon twisters who will be performing the “Latex Lasso”, which is a technical term for tying together the balloon and ribbon in a swift manner. Working at a nice pace with minimal “pops!” takes close to ten hours. Then, they are tied into groups of fifty (they wound up making 300 groups).  They were loaded onto 3 huge trucks and driven into the city. Once at the scene, balloons decorated the parade route, from the starting point through Columbus Circle and along the way in various sections to the reviewing stand at Macy’s.

This starts on Wednesday afternoon when inflation of the giant floats begins at 3PM and continues through the night. So when you show up first thing in the morning to get a good view of the parade, it is nicely decorated.

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