Chat with Naomi Simson
Founder of RedBalloon
About Naomi Simson
In 2001, Naomi Simson launched RedBalloon from her Melbourne lounge room with a radical idea: replace impersonal gift vouchers with curated, emotionally resonant experiences, hot-air ballooning over the Yarra Valley, pottery classes in Fremantle, or stargazing in the Flinders Ranges. She didn’t just build an e-commerce platform; she redefined gifting culture in Australia and New Zealand by treating every transaction as a human ritual, not a retail event. Her insistence on vetting every experience provider personally, often showing up unannounced to observe customer interactions, set a new standard for quality control in the experiential economy. Simson’s background in brand strategy and her early work with Telstra gave her rare insight into how digital platforms could deepen, rather than dilute, emotional connection. She championed local operators long before 'support small business' became a slogan, embedding community impact into RedBalloon’s unit economics. Her leadership helped shift investor perception of experience marketplaces from novelty to necessity, proving that scalability and soul needn’t be mutually exclusive.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Naomi Simson:
- “How did you convince skeptical experience providers to join RedBalloon in 2001?”
- “What made you pivot from corporate branding to launching a marketplace?”
- “Did RedBalloon’s acquisition by iSelect change your philosophy on experience curation?”
- “How do you measure the 'emotional ROI' of an experience versus a physical gift?”