From Bassist to Entrepreneur: Why I Started an Oshi-Katsu Business (PQuuut Balloon Support)

Flower stands at concerts and stage shows are a simple, visible way for fans to send their feelings to the venue. But as infection-control measures and venue rules made it harder to bring in fresh flowers, the question became how to keep that form of support alive.

Ayano Yazawa, CEO of KAZAORI, came up with PQuuut, a service that makes fan support visible through balloons, after the COVID years left her unable to send flowers to venues. Its official release on May 29, 2024 is an attempt to turn decoration from a gift into a participatory experience.

What matters from the fans' side is that it didn't simply shrink the traditional flower stand. It translated the feeling into a form venues can accept. Rather than ending in "we just have to put up with it," it turned the reason flowers can't be delivered into a way to take part from a distance. When a one-tap choice of an oshi color and a group effort to plan an arrangement with friends sit side by side in the same system, people can get involved in ways that match their experience and budget.

The wish to send support doesn't vanish when the means do. When one route is blocked, people look for another.

Without an outlet, some people turn to methods that go too far. Providing choices ends up preserving order.

For a service that gives support a physical form, it's reassuring to see the status both when the order is accepted and when the item reaches the venue. People taking part from far away also need to know how it was displayed and for how long. The whole thing is one experience, including what gets communicated after purchase, not just the sales screen.

Pick balloons online, entrust a message or a name, and it shows up in the venue's photo spot or decorations. Buyers don't just receive a finished product; they feel they helped create the scenery of the event.

The heart of this system isn't a substitute for a physical object. It's that the restriction "flowers can't be brought in" was reframed as a design challenge: connecting digital orders fans can join with the physical display on site.

Before ordering, you want to check who it's addressed to, where it will be displayed, and how widely names and messages will be visible. The more concrete a service is about where your participation will reach, and not just how gorgeous the finished photo looks, the fewer mix-ups after purchase. Spelling out which spots the oshi will see, when visitors can take photos, and when only a photo is reported back makes it easier to pick the experience you expect.

The shape of support has changed with each era: letters, telegrams, flowers, and now digital. The means change, but what people want to deliver stays the same.

How to treat people outside the venue is a challenge for live events everywhere today: people watching a stream, people who couldn't get tickets, people who live far away to begin with. They outnumber those inside the venue.

Whether there is a system for those people changes how far a performance spreads. Counting people outside the venue as participants is the design being called for.

Yazawa says that at 18 she played bass at a public taping of a music show at ZEPP TOKYO, and that her first professional fee was 9,999 yen. What she learned there about how performers, staff and audience move behind a glittering stage carries through to her business today.

She went on to stack up experience on the support side, including a TV project with YOSHIKI, an AKB48 show and backing-band work for stage productions. Because she understands the feelings of those who support the space and not only those who are supported as oshi, she can reconcile venue operations with fans' wishes.

Field experience helps a service not when it's a list of appearances used to dress up credibility, but when it lets you picture the load-in time, the flow of the audience seats and the removal after the show, and design so that placing a decoration doesn't suddenly add to someone else's workload. Companies should weigh what's feasible for the people behind the scenes as heavily as how it looks.

The burden on the person organizing a project deserves a look too. Whoever takes the lead tends to carry the money, the messages and the day itself alone.

That is the point of offering it as a service. Making it a form that works without relying on volunteer labor is what keeps the culture going.

PQuuut can accept joint names and messages from fans. Instead of one person buying a large decoration alone, you talk it over with friends, line up your names, and go see the finished space. The process of support itself becomes a memory.

Being able to buy online opens a way to take part for fans far away. Someone who can't go gives a gift and someone at the venue shares a photo, and this creates co-creation across distance.

For group projects, it also matters not to leave accounting and confirmations on the representative alone. Agreeing on the participation amount, the deadline, how names are written and how photos are shared after completion up front makes it easier for fans who've only just met to work toward the same goal. Deciding in advance how to treat people who join midway or drop out also keeps anyone from taking on a strain out of politeness.

Part of the demand for a way to make support visible is that venue rules have tightened: limits on what can be brought in, regulations on displayed items, and practices that took hold after the pandemic. The old methods can't be used in more and more situations.

The restrictions themselves are necessary. But if no substitute is offered, the wish to support has nowhere to go. Whether you can prepare an alternative at the same time as a ban is where operators show their skill.

Digital display is one such alternative. It takes up no physical space, people can take part from far away, and nothing needs to be disposed of after the show.

However, it can't fully reproduce the impact of a physical object. Rather than replacing one with the other, creating a state where people can choose is the realistic approach.

Participatory decoration, for its part, has to spell out the price, delivery date, display scope, cancellation, and the handling of likenesses and trademarks. The more a service deals in feelings, the more transparent its accounting and rules must be; that is the foundation of trust.

Balloons offer more freedom in transport and storage than fresh flowers, and are a material that is easy to combine in colors and shapes. They extend to seasonal decorations and corporate events, so they can also anchor a business that isn't confined to oshi-katsu.

The operators build each venue's prohibited materials and sizes, permissions for likenesses and logos, and even disposal and take-home into the order screen and the production process. As more venues adopt it, co-creation can expand safely only if individual checks aren't skipped and the extent to which completed photos can be returned to participants is decided in advance.

When expanding to corporate events, too, the difference comes from not blurring "to whom, and what feeling, are we delivering," a habit cultivated through oshi-katsu. If you can report not the area decorated but how the colors and words participants chose were received at the venue, the value of co-creation becomes a track record for corporate clients.

Support that takes a lasting form has a side benefit too: photos remain as a record you can look back on, and they reach people who weren't there on the day.

After the show, the decorations are cleared away, but the record remains. Whether it was built on the premise of leaving something behind changes the value of a project.

Venue decoration, gifts, event production, partnerships with overseas companies. As KAZAORI widens its range, what they share is the value of "putting someone's feelings somewhere they can be seen."

In fan business, it isn't enough to turn support into purchases; you need to design the moment when people feel their support arrived. PQuuut is trying to create that moment between the venue and online.

The experience closes its loop only when it doesn't stop at order, production or display, and names and photos come back to participants. While respecting venue rules and rights, returning proof of arrival even to people who can't go on site is at the center of turning decoration into a co-creation service.

The better the systems for delivering support get, the more visible the feeling itself becomes. What matters is that it shows up not as numbers or amounts but as the number of people who took part.

Even if fewer things stand in the venue, support has not decreased. Whether it is understood that only the form has changed is the challenge from here on.