My sister in law Christine celebrated a landmark birthday this year. I met her many a year ago when I first started dating my husband Scott. I remember my first impression of her was OMG, this girl is super-smart, beautiful, and has her stuff together. Christine hasn’t failed to live up to that first impression – she graduated as the valedictorian of her class, finished college in three years, and she moved from home in the Bay Area to LA to pursue her dreams of working in Hollywood (not as an actress, but as a big shot at Fox Studios). Serious overachiever.
One of the things that we’ve always had in common is our love of the entertainment industry. The posters on my wall growing up were eerily similar to the ones she had (umm, *NSYNC) and I love to live vicariously through her when she tells us stories of her run ins with celebrities.
Christine also helped me cross off something on my bucket list: going to Club 33 in Disneyland! Club 33 is a not-so-secret, uber-exclusive restaurant at Disneyland. It’s actually above the Blue Bayou restaurant in New Orleans Square. The food was better than average, but the experience was phenomenal. Club 33 closed for renovation at the beginning of this year and just recently reopened with a new look and feel. I really wanted to check out vintage Club 33 as Walt imagined it before it closed in January, and Christine was able to work her magic to make it happen!
Basically, Christine is a superstar, and I couldn’t ask for a better SIL.
30th Birthday Party in a Box
I thought it’d be awesome to send her some party vibes since we couldn’t be with her to celebrate. Below are the steps I took to plan her “virtual” 30th birthday party in a box, complete with little touches to throw an instant party along with a birthday splurge. I followed the steps from my How to Throw an Epic Party series.
Empathy Session:
Christine is: 1) Smart, 2) Passionate about the entertainment industry, and 3) Social.
- She likes going out with her besties.
- She’s really into music and indie bands.
- She’s a huge Lakers fan (Boo. Go Warriors!).
- She likes going to premieres and parties and getting dressed up.
- She’s very independent.
- She works extra hard.
- She doesn’t mind an occasional splurge.
Ideation:
With all this in mind, here are the potential themes I came up with:
- VIP, Drinks on Me: Some kind of VIP club experience, black/dark tones, glowsticks?
- Rest & Relaxation: Spa stuff, candle, healthy nibbles, light colors
- A Night Out on the Town: Limo ride with friends, disposable camera, red/black tones
Photo Gathering/Mood Boarding:
For this phase of my planning, I started searching online for images and ideas that would go with my potential themes. Because her birthday was coming up fast, I didn’t have that much time to dedicate to this, but I did find enough to get my creative juices flowing. Below are some of the inspirational images I found.
VIP Drinks on Me:
“Light and Color” by Brett Kiger is licensed under CC BY NC ND 2.0
“Party Pass” by Adam Caudill is licensed under CC BY 2.0
R&R:
“Squeaky Clean” by Katie W is licensed under CC BY NC ND 2.0
“Spa Accents” by KarlCossio is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Night Out on the Town:
“Palms and Limo” by Kim Nowacki is licensed under CC BY ND 2.0
“Red Carpet” by Chris Brown is licensed under CC BY SA 2.0
Finalizing the Theme:
Using my Theme Decider Tool, I rated each potential theme based on four major areas:
- Purpose of the party
- Guest of honor’s interests
- Location
- Budget
To start, I rated the importance each of the above components had on the overall party box. I then went through and ranked each of the themes on these areas, trying to be as realistic as possible and not sway myself on a theme that I liked the best. Finally, for each component, I multiplied the importance score with the theme’s score and entered it in the yellow rows. The yellow scores are all added together for each theme to come up with the final score.
Party Purpose: | 30th birthday in a box for my SIL | |||
Requirement (1= will perform horribly; 10= will perform extremely well) | Importance (1= not at all important; 10= very important) | THEME 1: VIP, Drinks on Me | THEME 2:R&R | THEME 3:A Night Out on the Town |
Does this themejive with the purpose of your party? | 9 | 10 | 9 | 10 |
PURPOSE TOTAL: | 90 | 81 | 90 | |
Does this jive with your guest of honor’s interests? | 10 | 9 | 9 | 9 |
GUEST OF HONOR INTEREST TOTAL: | 90 | 90 | 90 | |
Does this jive with the location of your party? | 7 | 10 | 10 | 10 |
LOCATION TOTAL: | 70 | 70 | 70 | |
Can you realistically accomplish your vision for this theme with the budget you’ve allotted? | 8 | 7 | 10 | 8 |
BUDGET TOTAL: | 56 | 90 | 64 | |
TOTAL SCORES: | 306 | 331 | 314 |
By the looks of it, everything scored pretty much the same until it came down to the budget. In order to achieve my grandiose visions, it would have been really hard to pull off themes 1 and 3 well. Rest & Relaxation it is!
Finalizing the Budget:
Here I planned how much I wanted to spend on each major component of my 30th birthday party in a box. Though it didn’t pan out exactly as I originally thought, it was pretty close, and it definitely helped me keep track of what I was buying in terms of how much I wanted to spend.
Note: In the event that my SIL actually reads this post, I’m not including the actual dollar amounts, just the percentages I allocated for each component of the gift.
Item | Budgeted % of Total | Actual % of Total | Budget – Actual |
Décor | 5% | 2% | +3% difference |
Supplies | 10% | 17% | -7% difference |
Main Gift | 75% | 71% | +4% difference |
Miscellaneous(Shipping, Card, Snacks) | 10% | 10% | 0% difference |
TOTAL | 100% | 100% | ($1.55) ← I overspent by just a little |
Food and Beverage:
Given that my birthday party in a box had to be shipped, the variety of food and beverage items I could include was limited to say the least. I originally bought a four-pack of Barefoot Bubbly Pink Moscato to include which was really dumb in hindsight.
I already had it set in my mind that I wanted to send this Priority Mail (not FedEx or UPS for budget reasons), and I failed to read through the regulations of items that can and can’t be shipped. Alcohol is prohibited, even if the recipient is of legal age. I sort of figured this might be the case, but decided to buy all my items first before determining what I could actually send. Not a smart move. Note to self and others: Read through the USPS “Can You Ship It?” article to see what you can or can’t ship before putting your package together.
The Playlist:
Christine is big on music. Her taste is much more eclectic than my own, so to find out some of her favorite artists and bands, I did some sleuthing on Facebook. Once I gathered a list of her faves, all I had to do was go to Spotify and do a search for popular songs from each of those artists. Narrowing the playlist down to 30 songs (a song for each year) was the hard part, but once that was done, my 30th birthday party in a box was almost complete.
Tune in next time for the big reveal of the final birthday in a box!