We have been planning, preparing, creating, and delivering birthday parties for almost 4 years now. On October 17th 2015 we had the honor to do a party for our own little one… my son’s 1st birthday! His name is Luca and he brings so much joy into our lives. We wanted to create a beautiful party to celebrate his life with the people that we most care for. It was a big challenge for us to deliver a nice party and at the same time work on other 8 parties for that same weekend. We didn’t want to miss any detail on any party so our outmost attention was required. But being a full-time mom, wife, and business owner I found myself overwhelm and juggling all at once. BUT guess what? grandma came to the RESCUE all the way from Mexico! She’s our hero… she helped take care of baby Luca and even added her special touch in some of the decor. She is amazing and has more energy than both my sister and I together haha. We love her and she is our inspiration. Back to my storey, so one day before the big day we had everything ready, we even had grandpa and hubby jump in to help with the final touches. Together as a team we can achieve greatness.
Saturday morning the day of my son’s birthday I had to be at work early to deliver two other beautiful parties for two other amazing kids (not to mention one of the kids was the daughter of someone we are big fans of Anthony Calvillo). We only had 1 hour to clean up and set up for Luca’s 1st birthday… our amazing Fiesta team pulled it together and completed the set up at exactly 4pm when the “Wild ONE” party started. We strongly believe that you can express your love through details and so that’s what we tried to convey. The guests were happy, the kids had a blast, and LUCA was the king of the night. He danced, he ate, he was so happy that he even stayed up until 11:00pm partying it up. We are so blessed to be surrounded by friends and family that care for us and for Luca “life should not only be lived, but should also be celebrated”
Cars & Trucks orange and blue theme for a cool 2 year old boy. We believe the inspiration of this theme came from his daddy’s awesome orange truck that was parked outside of our venue.
We took time and care of all the decorative details and made sure to have super yummy sweets. The mommy made sure to have super yummy food too.
We were overloaded with parties that weekend so my husband was kind enough to jump in and help with some crafts - he is a true teammate and he is too funny! He even showed me how to increase our productivity the FORD way. It went perfect with the theme since he had to line up the cars and trucks as an assembly line (we had a good laugh about it) I just love it when he gets involved =)
My favourite details were the paper caution cones that we used to label the food names and of course Sonia always makes sure to deliver an awesome cake and Dina the really cute cupcakes.
The guests loved the details, the kids loved the sweets, and it was a successful celebration. The key is in the prep ;)
NauticalThemeBabyShower
BabyOnBoard
We had so much fun preparing this carnival theme for Alexander & Kalista’s party. Most of the time we are posting pink pictures and very girly themes (which we love to do of course) so it was very nice to change it up a bit with this exciting theme. Our team are usually the entertainers but for this party we brought Magician Blair to put on a show for kids and parents. Everyone had a lot of fun!
After coming to Canada 8 years ago and working for one of Canada’s best employers’, Bombardier Aerospace, we both came to the realization that we were not feeling fulfilled through our work. In reality, we’ve been passionate about working with children for as long as we can remember and we wanted to channel that passion into creating awesome birthday memories for kids, not building airplanes. We wanted to invest our time creating fun and unique concepts for kids’ birthday celebrations and at the very same time provide a hassle-free service for our clients; this way they get to enjoy the FIESTA experience as well.
In the photo above we are in our small party room where we have thrown over 500 hundred parties. We would not have been able to do this without our family and friends who have supported us, encouraged us to follow our dreams, and to persevere through the trials of making them a reality. Our dream was not about becoming millionaires, but about doing something we love. Ironically, since we’ve left Bombardier people often mistake us working for our own business as some sort of vacation when realistically speaking, we are working way more now than we would at a regular 9-5 job. Developing a business is no joke; it requires major commitment, hard work, much sacrifice, extreme focus, and lots and lots of energy to follow through and continue to grow. However, with our passion and our faith in God, this NON-STOP PARTY is possible.
Finally, it is a reality that both Karla and I are working full-time for our own business. It took two years of working full-time at a very demanding job for another business AND running our own, but now we can both be completely committed and fully focused on our passion, our business. We’ve learned that the one thing you can control in life is your effort, and if your effort is there, and your heart is in it, you become unstoppable- this is far from easy, but it is extremely rewarding.
Viva la FIESTA!
Trial by fire: Our Journey into the Dragons Den
This was by far one of the craziest experiences that we have gone through in our entrepreneurial lives!
Here is our story.
Just this past January, my sister and I got the news that auditions were open to appear on the show, Dragons Den. Now, if I were to tell you that we religiously watch the show, and that it is our favorite and that we’ve dreamed for years about being on the show; that would simply be an understatement, we are absolutely fans of the Dragons! So, there we were thinking, auditions are open….LET’S DO THIS! Though the idea seemed a little crazy, being such the fanatics of the show that we are, we decided to give it a shot. Our audition was at Concordia University in Montreal. On the first day they were about 50 people waiting to pitch to the show’s producers. My sister and I had perfectly memorized our pitch and we felt more than ready to audition in a way that would set ourselves apart from the 50 other entrepreneurs, but we felt we had one significant problem. Out of those 50 other people looking to strike a deal with a Dragon, we were the only ones who did not have a product! Our business offers an amazing and unique service that we are very confident in, but we were going to need to articulate this to the producers in an exceptional fashion rather than performing a simple product demonstration. It was quite challenging but we succeeded. We delivered our pitch and felt confident that we did well. CBC tours in about 33 cities across Canada and they have over 3,000 people that audition which means we had less than a 5% chance to get selected to pitch to THE DRAGONS. We knew our chances were slim but as the saying goes, “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” so we took a shot. Fortunately, we got a call back three weeks after the audition – one of the producers called and said, “girls, you have been selected to pitch your business idea to THE DRAGONS, we believe you girls will do great on show.” We were absolutely ecstatic! We could barely believe we were actually going to meet the dragons face-to-face and potentially showcase our business on national television… WOW! Our business name is FIESTA, and we can promise you, that is exactly what we did that night!
The process of preparing to face the Dragons was intense and required us signing several NDAs with CBC – you lose most of your rights when you are filming for a show. You also have to be ready to accept all the editing, etc. and we knew this could be very risky – but we knew it would be worth it! We decided to play in the Dragons’ playground and we were ready to deal with fire.
We practiced our pitch many times together and with and our producer/coach. At the end of the day, it is television so you need to be entertaining. Originally, we wanted to bring kids – because Fiesta is all about the KIDS, but the producers wouldn’t allow us. We also wanted to bring videos of our venue and a Party so that we could show the Dragons exactly what we do, but that was a no go as well. We were lucky to have our business mentor who helped us a lot by determining the potential value of the business, and projections of future gains, etc. We were also very blessed to have lots of family and friends who gave us valuable feedback regarding our pitch and preparation for our appearance in the Dragons Den. Despite the obstacles that were thrown at us before we even walked into the Den, we were determined to persevere.
March 28th – was the big day! We arrived to Toronto one day before pitching to the Dragons. That night after a nice dinner, we tried to go to bed early but it was nearly impossible to sleep. The nerves had already begun to kick in!
The next morning we had breakfast, we prayed, and arrived at the CBC recording studio at 1pm. We finally met our producer “coach” in person because up until that point we’d only corresponded via email and on the phone. She was super nice and very helpful. Once we were there we did our sweet table set up and waited about 4 hours until it was finally our turn to step into the Den and face the Dragons. This is a one shot scenario – if you choke, then that will be aired on TV for the world to see! Feeling the pressure, we did our best to take deep breaths and control our nerves so that we wouldn’t choke in front of them. We saw a couple of pitchers leaving the Den crying, and that only made staying calm that much more challenging. Trust me, we were downright scared! We finally told ourselves that we were going to have fun with it regardless of the consequences would be. Our time was nearing and the pressure was intense, then out of nowhere, our producer tells us we need to change up our pitch! She told us the Dragons were getting tired and that we needed to spice things up! Talk about feeling stressed; we were expected to change our pitch, the one we’d perfectly mastered, just moments before facing the Dragons…tired and now possibly annoyed Dragons!. Without choice, we changed our pitch at the very last minute! Feeling totally overwhelmed and frazzled, it was at this point that we just wanted to get it over with. We finally decided on 3 major priorities: 1. DO NOT fall going down the stairs, 2. DO NOT let the dragons bash our business, 3. DO Have fun in the Den!
The make-up artist gave us a few touch ups. We put our microphones on, the cameras were ready and it was finally our turn to go. We were backstage ready to go down the stairs to face the Dragons… the producer began the countdown, “10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1… Karla and Alejandra from Montreal!” We walked down the stairs, legs trembling, Ale murmuring something that sounded like a prayer under her breath, and then there they were, 5 Dragons staring intensely right at us…
To be continued…
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Feb 12, 2015 So finally we aired last night!! Short and Sweet =)
As you all now know we didn’t get a deal but we got to party in the Den! What a wonderful experience that was. The filming took approximately 25 minutes and CBC will post a longer segment online (we will keep you posted). The Dragons did not want to invest in our business because they thought it would take long to scale. They gave us great advice and we left the den with our head up high. Ultimately, our purpose for our business is more significant than making money. We stand strong in “Legacy over currency.” The people that know us know that our objective is to serve our clients the best possible way and create wonderful birthday memories and also to influence little girls in a positive way. If in any way we can make a difference in the kids that we meet and their families then that is what really matters. We thank-you all for all the support, this has been by far one of the scariest experiences of our lives and we are so grateful for all the people that surround us and encourage us to keep on going.
Dragons' Den preparation
My sister and I are huge fans of the show - it's pretty much the only tv we get to watch in our busy lives lol. So we decided we would go audition to try to get an investment - it doesn't hurt to try. We thought it was a long-shot because there are thousands people that audition for the show. We prepare a fun pitch and went for it. It was kind of funny we practiced it a few times and we couldn't get the script right it was pretty frustrating so we decided to just talk with an open heart about our business and guess what? We got in! Yay!
We will pitch to the Dragons end of March 2014. I think our intro line helped us, we started the pitch by saying "when you think of Mexico you don't think of siesta -you think of FIESTA" lol it was cheesy but caught their attention. At the end of the audition one of the producers asked me "if a dragon says something very negative about your business how would you react?" I replied "my little company is my baby I would get latina on them" fisty! Lol
-Karla
Little Miss Fashion
"the PINK carpet"
Our new pink carpet fashion party is ideal for any girlie girl. Birthday girl and her friends get a glam make over: fancy hair do's and they get to wear tutus and fashion accessories. At Kayla's party she even brought her owned designed outfits for her friends to wear! We first did a practice catwalk were we taught the kids how to walk like a model and keep balance and of course strike a pose! All the girls were extremely creative with their outfits and their poses - it was a perfect fashion show and photo-shoot! The best part is that we created a picture video of all the photos taken during the party and Kayla got to keep this as a lifetime souvenir. She shared it with her fiends and they are still talking about the party. FUN!
We love doing personalized gifts ! These can be filled with candy or any additional girly product. The small one with Maya’s name is for a Sweet Fiesta where the girls will decorate their own cupcake and take it home in this cute holder. They can then use it for jewelry, candy, or anything special that they want to keep safe. =)
This Mickey & Minnie trendy party was for a pretty little two year old. As you can see we did not use the traditional Minnie paper goods, to make it more clean and stylish we used only the colors and famous polka dots. Her mommy thought of giving the minnie ornaments to the guest as she began doing this last year on her 1st birthday since Sienna’s birthday is so close to Christmas. Each ornament was personalized to each of her guests. We used a party hat to wrap it and added the mouse ears and bow. So lovely! The cake pops … of course always a hit! And what is a M&M party without their appearance? Mickey and Minnie both came to the party, dance and played games with the kids. Such a cute party!
This Fiesta for Bianca was so SWEET! We began Bianca’s party with a craft activity to style our chef hats that soon they will wear to create Bianca’s cake. They did a fantastic job with their stylish flowers. Then we showed them several options but it seem like the rainbow option was the popular choice! =) We put the kids’ names on the toppers so that they can each eat their cupcake once the birthday girl blew out the candles. After cupcakes, sweet popcorn and cotton candy we danced the sugar rush off! It was so much fun!
