Picture perfect: how social media created a new niche for the party industry.

• Author: Biton, Adva
• Position: Business Trends

When many of us were growing up, kids' birthday parties--along with most parties thrown at home--were shindigs consisting of paper plates and plastic decor picked up at the local big-box party shop. The most recent big blockbuster movie made for the theme, if there was a theme. Cakes were often grocery store sheet cakes with large waxy number candles. For birthdays, a string of primary-color letters reading out "Happy Birthday" made for a great reuseable garland.

But times have changed. Out-of-the-package parties don't look good on Instagram, don't get pins on Pinterest, and certainly don't make people the envy of all their friends and family. Look up a kid's birthday party on Instagram these days--multi-tiered cakes, themed snacks, glittering favors, dazzling DIY decor that shows how great a parent you are and how handy you are? That's all the norm now. And the escalation of these Pinterest-perfect parties has bolstered a new niche industry in the state.

"I think the bar has been raised with how a party 'should' look," says Brittany Watson Jepsen, founder and creative director of The House that Lars Built. "People think 'Oh, that's how it should be? That's what I'll do."'

Content creation

Those Instagram and Pinterest parties don't just materialize fully formed from the ether. Content creators like Jepsen are often at the helm of trend creation, and bloggers are hard at work staying on the shifting crest of what's cool and new and what's yesterday's news.

Jepsen began her DIY craft, design and lifestyle blog, The House that Lars Built, nine years ago as a graduate school project. It was for a fictitious family, headed by a man named Lars, and the residential design that Jepsen created for them. As time went on, Jepsen put more and more time into the blog, until one day, she posted about DIY-ing her entire wedding. The massive paper flowers Jepsen featured in the blog post attracted traffic to her blog, and enough people inquired after them that she began to include tutorials.

It was the first step in a craft revolution for Jepsen. She began to focus on creating new and interesting crafts for those who read her blog for inspiration. "My goal is to not always dig into the trends, but create more trends," she says. "'I think a lot of these new traditions come from [content creators]. I have to constantly think of new ideas."

So while Jepsen herself may not be throwing picture-perfect parties or baking smash cakes for any young children in her...