About Blulu
We are Blulu. We make the parts of a house that get used up, and we sell them by the pack: the decorations, the fixings, the storage and the small kit that goes with them.
We make 1159 lines across 15 shelves, from a pair of clips to a 5000-piece box of nails. Party and celebration is our largest shelf at 239 lines, wall fixings the next at 219, and after those come the seasonal boxes, the storage bins, everyday clothing basics and the craft table. We make for households rather than for the trade, and we go broad because a house is broad: picture hooks and paper napkins turn up on the same shopping list more often than either turns up alone.
One habit holds it together. We state the count, the size and the material. We give a pack count on 954 of our lines and we name 19 colours across the range.
Our second habit is division. A bigger box is not always the better value, so we follow every price we publish with what one piece of it costs, rounded up to the cent so the smaller number is never the flattering one.
And our limits, in the same breath. We are not a till: ordering, payment, delivery and returns all happen at checkout with the retail partner, and anything to do with a parcel belongs to them. What belongs to us is what we make, what we count and what we write about it.
How we decide what to make
We do not add a line to complete a set. We keep making what gets reordered, in the count it gets reordered in, and we drop it when that stops. It is why our range looks uneven written down: forty shades of one thing on one shelf, and a single size of another.
We make the dull half of a good day
A birthday lives in the memory as the cake. It runs on forty paper plates, a bag of balloons, tape that holds to a painted wall and something to weigh the tablecloth down outdoors. We make the second list, the one written at eight in the evening after the first one is finished.
So we go broad rather than deep, and we go broad in a particular direction: Party & Celebration and Wall & Fixings are our two biggest shelves, and between them they are most of what a house puts up, lays out and takes down again.
We lead with how many
We put the count first on every card we publish, before the colour and before the price. For what we make it is also the only fact that settles anything: napkins are bought by the fifty and anchors by the hundred, and a page that leads with a shade of pink has answered the wrong question.
Two hundred balloons at eleven dollars and thirty at four do not compare until somebody divides, so we print the division next to the price instead of leaving it to the buyer at the checkout.
We round nothing and invent nothing
We print a row when we have the figure for it. We state a pack count on 954 of our 1159 lines and we name 19 colours across the range.
A count also tells you how long a box will last. A pack of fifty hooks can cover a year of small repairs, and a pack of five hundred beads a term of craft tables. Knowing that before you open the box is the difference between buying once and buying the same thing three times in a season, which is the most expensive way to shop for small parts.
We sort our Fifteen shelves by the job
The same object gets filed in half a dozen different places depending on who is doing the filing, which is a good way to lose somebody halfway through a list. So we put a Halloween favour on the seasonal shelf in October rather than under tableware, a mirror clip with wall fixings rather than with mirrors, and a toe sleeve with foot care rather than with socks.
We sort by what you are shopping for, not by what the thing technically is. Where a line honestly belongs nowhere, we put it in Pets & More rather than wedge it onto a shelf to look tidy.
Prices you can act on
We date our prices once, on the sources page. When a line cannot be bought, its page comes down until it can, so every price you see is one you can pay.
Prices
When we cannot get a line to you we take it off the shelf here until we can, because a pack count beside a price nobody will honour is worse than an empty peg. We put the date of our last update on the sources and practice page.
Where to start
- All 1159 lines, filterable by department and pack size.
- What we make it from, counted from what we state on the products.
- Three guides: fixing things to a wall, counting a party backwards, and sorting small parts.