Athens party designer shares game-day table ideas

Welcome back to Rise Up Tonight. Let's head in the nest with Kelly, Tori, and this week's special guest, brought to you by Mercedes-Benz. You guys, we are in the middle of the party, clearly here with this week's In the Nest guests as the Falcons go on the road and you want to host a really awesome tailgate party or watch party. Burton and Burton is going to have you covered. I'm here with Maxine Burton of Burton and Burton. Everything you can see here is something you can get from you guys. And I want to actually talk about the business. You started this 45 years ago. We were talking about. It's pretty crazy. I know, especially I'm only 46. What kind of business is this? What started you in this industry and why did you want to start your own business doing this? I like to eat. Don't we all. I wanted a new home so I decided I needed a business in order to do that and we already had a business. So my husband was already in the floral business, he had a wholesale florist that he was partners in and I was looking for something that would relate to that business and balloons were new, the floating balloons, so I decided that that would be a good product to sell to flower shops. What was it like to kind of expand this business? It's just amazing how the change has been so interesting being in a business that you have been shaping, helping shape the industry and just be able to see it grow into an industry because people thought it was just a fad at the time when I started the business and I don't think anything would be, anyone would say it's a fad now. Walk me through kind of the idea of some of these things that you, like a vase that you maybe would use in different ways. We have these items for also like basketball and soccer and other things so you can kind of apply this to other sports as well. Sure. It's football season, you can take and adapt this to basketball season. Absolutely. So here we have some planters and you see I have a beautiful flower arrangement here with my football arrangement. And then the same planter we're using here to hold our napkins. And then we have the smaller version of the planter that we put our silverware in. So smart. And then we have this stadium which is a chip and dip. So we have our dip and our little football and then we have our chips and our nice stadium here. I love that place. And then we took a planter here and we put our soft drinks in so you can have that on your table. So all of these can be things that you could use. You could use these for plants when you're not using it for your drinks. Sure. And we also added some beautiful ribbon on to the side to give you a little bit more color. We went to the hardware store and bought some artificial turf. For our grass. And also, the most important thing, we have to have our balloons. Of course. So we've got our football balloons here. We've got our little football here. And we have this little stand that you can just hook it into. And this is just an air inflated balloon. So that you don't have to have the whole hanging situation. You can have it on your table. And then also, you notice that I have a football mug here. We also have these for other sports as well. And we put a lot of little straws in here. You could put other kind of party items in there. Or you can use it to drink, I love. We've got some helium filled balloons, which is really nice with all of our Falcon balloons here and some regular football balloons to go. And one of the things I want to show you too is also our new Bella Balloon Plus. Yeah, I'm really excited about learning about this. First self-sealing latex balloon ever on the market. And so I'm just going to pump one by air, but these are great when you're doing helium. So okay, I'm just going to inflate this really quickly. I didn't want to bring my electric pump because electric pump does much better. So, you know, one of the things I think people hate about latex balloons is the fact of having to tie it. But look at this. That's incredible. You don't even have to tie it. So this is really quick when you're doing your party decorating. You can just get it to a wonderful, portable helium tanks, inflate. Tie the ribbon, and you're already done. Do you know how many years out of my life I've lost having to do those ties at bachelorette parties and all those things? That would have saved my life so many times. I wish I had. Well, we're going to leave some back for you today so that we're going to save your life. That is incredible. And I just want to point out one other thing that I just love is we have these little football. Oh, I know. I'm obsessed with those. You can see them up front. They're so cute. But also, they decorate your table. And besides just decorating your table, they're a great party favor. Oh, sorry. children at the party and if you don't have a great idea and then if you have parents in here and they want to take something home to the children because they've been to the party. When you're putting together a, whether it's a tailgate party or any kind of event, like where do you kind of start? What's the first thing is that you kind of buy one thing that you're like, okay, I'm going to kind of base everything off of this. Is it the colors you start with? Where do you kind of start when you're trying to conceptualize what you want to do? Well, I just, you know, I like to, to entertain. So I just think about what's my theme going to be. And so I think about my theme. Because it's going to be red and black, right? Of course. So we've got to surround it. And it's also going to be football. So I've got to figure out what all can I do for football and how can I accent all the football items without it being just football. So we've got the turf because football is played on the grass. Also we've got the craft paper to kind of give us some other color. So I just kind of think about things like that. I do a lot of Christmas parties. I'm known for my parties in Athens, so I just love to entertain. And I like to also. So when I'm accessorizing, I like to have different heights so you can see how we did We did pedestals to make sure that we have different things on different levels. And so it's not everything just flat on the ground. So I think that's very important. Yeah, to have some different height there, yeah. So like I mentioned, everything here Is Burton & Burton available through you guys? Where can people go buy that? Is it on your website? Are there stores that they can go to? How can people access it? Well, we sell to most flower shops. We sell to most hospital gift shops. We sell to grocery stores. Kroger is one of our big accounts, but we have a lot of other grocery stores that buy from us. So if you go in and also we We sell, we're gonna be selling, you can find a lot of our things on Amazon as well. Oh, okay, perfect. And the available ones, you can find the balloons on Amazon. Yeah, I'm gonna definitely have to be investing in those. Those are awesome. Well, thanks so much for walking us through this. I'm sure Falcons fans are gonna appreciate some ideas. Sometimes you just don't know where to start and you gave us a great kind of blueprint of where to start. Thanks so much for being here, Maxine. I really appreciate it. And yeah, you guys can take this to your watch party at home. But for now, we'll be right back on Rise Up tonight.