Big Shiny Balls: How Jules and Shawn Kolodny Turned 40 Million Views Into a Business Built on Wonder

A viral video gave Jules and Shawn Kolodny something most entrepreneurs spend years searching for: unmistakable product-market fit. What they built next offers a lesson in scale, creativity, technology, and building a company with the person you love.

---

There are viral moments, and then there are business opportunities disguised as viral moments.

For Jules and Shawn Kolodny, the difference was approximately 40 million views.

Before Big Shiny Balls became a company creating massive inflatable art for global brands, cultural events, stadiums, hotels, and consumers, Shawn was simply experimenting with an installation for a friend’s music festival.

A sculptor with a background in New York hospitality, Shawn had developed a philosophy about his work that was almost comically straightforward: scale sells.

If a sculpture was compelling at three feet, what happened when you made it thirty?

While developing the festival installation, Shawn sourced enormous inflatable chrome spheres reminiscent of his existing artwork. One afternoon, he inflated several beside a pool to see how they moved and behaved. Like most creators building an audience, he filmed the experiment and posted it online.

The caption was equally uncomplicated: “Inflating balls by the pool.”

Then the internet did what the internet occasionally does.

The video exploded.

Forty million views later, something more interesting was happening in the comments. People weren’t simply liking, sharing, or tagging friends.

They wanted to buy them.

“Most viral moments are just noise,” Jules says. “But this one was actual demand with nowhere to go. That’s the rarest thing you’ll ever stumble into, and it’s also the easiest thing in the world to waste, because attention fades fast.”

Shawn didn’t waste it.

He bought a domain with a name almost impossible to forget: Big Shiny Balls.

And a brand was born.

WHEN VIRALITY BECOMES PRODUCT-MARKET FIT

Entrepreneurs are frequently told not to confuse attention with demand. Jules Kolodny had already spent much of her career learning precisely that distinction.

A pioneer in the early fashion and social media landscape, she built audiences and communities before “creator economy” became an industry term. She would go on to build multiple companies across fashion, technology, contemporary art, and culture.

That experience gave her an unusual advantage when Shawn’s video took off.

She knew what she was looking at.

“When you build audiences for a living, you learn very quickly to tell the difference between attention and demand,” Jules says. “I’d seen enough vanity moments to know we were looking at the other kind.”

Most founders begin with a hypothesis and then spend years searching for proof that consumers want what they’re building.

The Kolodnys experienced the sequence in reverse.

“We started with a video, forty million views, and an inbox full of people trying to hand us money for something that didn’t exist yet,” Shawn says.

That doesn’t mean the decision felt safe.

Shawn had already left an established hospitality career to pursue art and admits there was a period when returning to his former life seemed entirely possible.

“I wasn’t fearless,” he says. “What gave me confidence wasn’t a vision deck. It was watching people react. When something that simple makes that many people light up, you listen.”

Jules had another reason to take the leap.

The couple wasn’t only deciding whether to build a company together. They were building a life together.

“Shawn and I were hoping to build a life together,” she says. “Building the company was the same decision, pointed at a different thing.”

THE POWER COUPLE ADVANTAGE

Building a company with your spouse can sound either romantic or disastrous depending on whom you ask.

For the Kolodnys, it became a competitive advantage.

Their backgrounds could hardly be more complementary.

Shawn understands physical space: sculpture, fabrication, materials, scale, and how an object changes the feeling of a room.

Jules understands the ecosystem surrounding the object: creative direction, storytelling, culture, partnerships, positioning, and why people should care.

“My side is the form and the craft,” Shawn says. “Hers is the narrative, the partners, the reason anyone should care.”

His shorthand for their partnership may explain Big Shiny Balls better than any corporate org chart could:

“I make the thing. She makes the world around the thing.”

They were initially nervous about working together.

“We had a good thing going and neither of us wanted a business to be the thing that wrecked it,” Shawn says.

Instead, they discovered what many successful founder couples eventually learn: complementary weaknesses can be as valuable as complementary strengths.

“We’re total yin and yang,” he says. “Wherever one of us is weak, the other one is already standing there.”

There is still one non-negotiable.

Protect the friendship first.

They divide responsibilities according to strengths rather than titles. Shawn leads deeply on design, fabrication, and the physical product. Jules drives creative direction, partnerships, and the larger world surrounding the work.

When they disagree, they try to argue the idea rather than each other.

Some nights, an installation still follows them to dinner. Other nights, the laptops are deliberately closed.

The business matters. The marriage matters more.

FROM INFLATABLE ART TO CULTURAL CURRENCY

It would be easy to dismiss inflatable sculpture as novelty.

Then you look at where the Kolodnys’ work has appeared.

One of Jules’ favorite examples is Glow Revived, created with e.l.f. Cosmetics and NYLON at the W South Beach during Miami Art Week.

The concept took the architecture of a lip balm and transformed it into an environment.

Dozens of illuminated teardrop forms, some approximately ten feet tall and colored after the product’s flavors, greeted visitors. In the garden behind the property, forty glowing sculptures formed a labyrinth.

Visitors didn’t simply observe the installation.

They entered it.

“People didn’t look at it,” Jules says. “They got lost in it.”

For her, the project demonstrates an increasingly important lesson for companies competing for consumers’ attention: a brand activation does not have to feel like advertising.

It can be art first.

The same philosophy carried into work that appeared behind Olivia Dean at the Grammys. Viewers didn’t need to understand who commissioned the object or why it existed.

They simply saw something beautiful.

Shawn’s most surreal project arrived with only about a month’s notice.

Ahead of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour stop in New Orleans, the team received a request involving one of the most recognizable symbols of Swift’s fan culture: the friendship bracelet.

Except this one needed to be enormous.

The result was not one, but two bracelets approximately 140 feet long, constructed with seven-foot nylon “beads” spelling out “Taylor Swift The Eras Tour.”

Something normally assembled at a kitchen table now required forklifts to install.

Fans lined up beneath the installation for photographs throughout the weekend. The bracelets later traveled to other stadiums. Swift herself talked about the installation from the stage.

“You don’t process any of that in the moment,” Shawn says. “You process it weeks later, how a piece of art can become a cultural phenomenon.”

That transformation, from object to experience to shared cultural artifact, is increasingly central to the business the Kolodnys are building.

BEHIND THE WHIMSY IS SERIOUS ENGINEERING

The irony of Big Shiny Balls is that making something appear effortless requires an extraordinary amount of technical work.

A massive inflatable sculpture may begin with a conversation about emotion: What should someone feel when they enter the space?

Then creativity collides with physics.

How large must the piece become before it visually reads correctly? Which material will behave appropriately? What happens outdoors? What happens in wind? Under stage lighting? What happens when thousands of people inevitably touch it?

Three-dimensional models become maps. Complex forms must be translated into flat panels that can be cut and sewn, then inflated back into the exact shape envisioned digitally.

There are prototypes, full-scale color tests, material decisions, revisions, anchoring calculations, wind loading, redundancies, and sometimes weeks of approvals.

“Our job is mostly to protect the idea while it goes through that,” Shawn says.

That sentence could apply to almost any creative business trying to scale.

Systems are necessary. Safety is necessary. Repeatability is necessary.

But the system cannot become so dominant that the original magic disappears.

Throughout production, the team keeps returning to one question:

Is the thing they are now capable of building still the thing that made everyone excited in the first place?

HOW DO YOU SCALE ART WITHOUT DILUTING IT?

Big Shiny Balls occupies an unusual business category.

It is part contemporary art studio, part experiential agency, part event design company, and part consumer décor brand.

The Kolodnys eventually realized that trying to make one company answer every version of that opportunity wasn’t the smartest path.

Their solution was structural.

Kolossal Arts became the bespoke studio for commissioned, one-of-one, large-scale projects. Big Shiny Balls remained the made-to-order business where products and processes could be repeated.

Some pieces may sit in front of thousands of people at a global event.

Another may be purchased for a family’s backyard.

The standard, they insist, remains the same.

“A ball from the catalog is made from the same materials, to the same finish, as one built for an installation,” Shawn says. “There’s no good line and cheap line.”

Jules goes further.

She rejects the assumption that accessibility inherently compromises artistic integrity.

“The accessible end isn’t where the integrity gets diluted,” she says. “It’s the whole point.”

For Jules, democratizing access to the work expands the artistic mission. Monumental inflatable art shouldn’t exist solely for Fortune 500 companies with enormous experiential budgets.

A family should be able to experience some version of that joy, too.

“Scale comes from the process being repeatable, not the idea being watered down,” she says. “If a product version still makes someone smile when they open the box, we haven’t sold out. We’ve made the idea travel farther.”

AI SHOULD CREATE LEVERAGE, NOT TASTE

The Kolodnys are also navigating another challenge facing nearly every creative company: determining where artificial intelligence belongs in the process.

Their answer is surprisingly clear.

Use technology to give a small team the leverage of a larger organization.

Don’t let it replace the human judgment that makes the organization valuable.

“We’re a small team going up against much larger companies,” Jules says, “so we’ve leaned into AI, but specifically on the parts of this business that aren’t the art.”

Generative imagery has become particularly useful during concept development. Before materials are ordered or prototypes constructed, the team can visualize how an ambitious object might live inside an actual environment.

Multiple concepts can be explored before physical production begins, reducing both development time and material waste while helping clients understand an idea that might otherwise be difficult to imagine from a traditional sketch.

But Shawn draws a firm boundary.

“The line we hold is that AI never touches the object,” he says. “The physical work is designed, patterned, sewn, and inspected by people.”

Then comes the principle that may matter most for creative founders wondering how far to automate:

“Technology buys us range. It doesn’t get a vote on taste.”

THE POST-INSTAGRAM EXPERIENCE ECONOMY

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Big Shiny Balls isn’t what the company has already built.

It’s what the Kolodnys believe consumers will want next.

For roughly a decade, experiential marketing became increasingly optimized for the camera. Brands created photogenic spaces designed to encourage visitors to document themselves inside them.

The photograph became the experience.

Shawn believes audiences are beginning to demand more.

“Anyone can produce a photogenic room now, and audiences can tell when they’re being used as distribution,” he says.

The next generation of immersive experiences, he believes, will prioritize participation over documentation.

Touch something.

Move something.

Change something.

Do something.

“The measure isn’t whether it photographs well,” Shawn says. “It’s whether anything happens if you put your phone away.”

It is a deceptively powerful test for an industry built around impressions, shares, and social reach.

And it happens to favor the product the Kolodnys stumbled into years ago.

A giant shiny ball practically begs to be touched.

“A giant ball is one of the very few art objects a stranger will walk up and push without being invited,” Shawn says. “It needs no explanation and no wall text. A three-year-old and a sixty-year-old have the same reaction at the same time.”

That universal reaction is becoming the foundation for the company’s next chapter.

The Kolodnys want more permanent installations, more public art, more civic and cultural partnerships, and an even larger accessible consumer business alongside their global brand work.

The ambition is considerable.

But their metric for success remains almost absurdly simple.

“We’re still two people who get excited when a giant shiny object makes a room full of adults act like kids again,” Shawn says. “If we can keep that feeling as the company grows, we’re doing it right.”

For founders obsessed with dashboards, algorithms, optimization, and scale, Big Shiny Balls offers a refreshingly human business lesson.

Sometimes the market tells you exactly what it wants.

The difficult part is recognizing the signal before the rest of the internet moves on, and then building something big enough to meet it.

IG: @bigshinyballs