She Called Kiddie Pools “Sad and Blue.” Her Balloon Garland Sold Seven Figures in 24 Hours
Emily Vaca spent more than a decade as an art director in Chicago advertising, rising to associate creative director at one of the city’s top design agencies, working on campaigns, packaging, and digital work for national brands. On the side, starting in 2012, she ran a personal design studio, and in 2014 she started a blog called Sugar & Gold to document DIY and event-design projects from her own wedding. That blog grew into La Vaca Designhouse, and in 2017 La Vaca launched its first retail product: MINNIDIP, a stylish, adult-oriented inflatable pool built to replace what she’s called the “sad, blue” kiddie pools that dominated the category. The idea had been sitting with her for years — she’d wanted a beautiful pool for a rooftop party and found nothing on the market — until her husband reminded her of it in 2017 and, worried a competitor would beat her to it, she pushed the product out fast.
It took roughly two years to design the product and find the right manufacturer, and the first run — about 1,500 units — launched in June 2017, funded through pre-orders and timed, awkwardly, past peak pool season. Vaca built the brand on Instagram and her own website before ever pitching a retailer, deliberately designing packaging as if the product were already destined for store shelves. Within the first year the brand also had to work through a trademark dispute over its original name, forcing costly legal fees and a hand-relabeling of existing inventory before the company settled on MINNIDIP — a play on “skinny dipping” that she landed on after testing roughly 500 candidate names. She and her husband self-funded the entire venture, using personal savings and, by her own account, putting their house up as effective collateral for an inflatable pool business. He later joined MINNIDIP full-time as Chief Marketing Officer in 2020.
IThe brand’s signature look is a patented, scalloped “tufted” silhouette Vaca developed in 2019, inspired by channel-tufted furniture, which became MINNIDIP’s most recognizable design cue; she’s since designed dozens of seasonal patterns, treating each drop like a small fashion collection rather than a one-off product refresh. Within a year of launching, she landed a meeting with a Target buyer after roughly six months of consistent cold emailing, and MINNIDIP secured national shelf space the following year. The brand has since expanded into Bloomingdale’s, QVC, Anthropologie, and Urban Outfitters, plus international distribution in Canada and Australia, and has run limited collaborations with Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams and alice + olivia. By 2023, MINNIDIP had sold more than 1 million units since launch, landed on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies, and posted 176% revenue growth from 2020 to 2022 — entirely self-funded, without outside investors.
In 2024, the company found its biggest growth lever yet outside of pools entirely: a reusable, phthalate-free balloon garland line that let customers inflate an event-worthy balloon cluster themselves instead of hiring a professional. A launch video for the product drew more than 30 million views on Instagram within days and added roughly 200,000 new followers to the brand’s account; a July restock drew a waitlist of more than 51,000 people, and the category sold seven figures within 24 hours. It’s a smart hedge against the core business’s biggest structural weakness — pools are a short, weather-dependent summer season, while balloon garlands sell for birthdays, weddings, and parties year-round — and the company has said it’s on track to roughly triple revenue on the strength of that new category. MINNIDIP now competes against both boutique design-forward brands like FUNBOY and Sunnylife and mass suppliers like Intex and Bestway, in a global pool-float category that multiple industry estimates put in the hundreds of millions of dollars and growing, driven by the same premiumization and backyard-leisure trends that built MINNIDIP’s original audience in the first place.
In this episode, Emily shares the constraints she embraced, how she pushed through manufacturing dead ends, and how she designs with purpose and durability in mind.
Listen to the full conversation with Emily Vaca on Apple Podcasts