The big business of college bed parties

It seems that for today’s youths — many of whom are headed off to college this fall — the hoopla of high school grad parties and university-branded T-shirts alone just won’t cut it. 

The evidence: bed parties, a growing trend that’s turned college acceptance announcements into their own cause for celebration, with parents spending big on transforming their teens’ bedrooms into stages for instagrammable photo opps to commemorate the milestone. 

Here’s the lowdown  

The trend took off during the pandemic, when in-person socializing was disrupted and people were seeking ways to celebrate at home, per The New York Times. First popularized in the South, it’s now reached America’s greater college-going population thanks to social media, where incoming freshmen have been sharing their picture-ready setups. 

Typical ingredients of a bed party include school-color decor like streamers and tinsel curtain backdrops, balloon letters, snacks, and lots and lots of swag. Some involve gifts and guests, while others are purely for the pics. 

They’re more common among girls and can cost anywhere from hundreds of dollars to thousands for those going all out.

“There's definitely money to be made in this business,” Melinda Long, who spent ~$2k on her daughter’s bed party, told Business Insider. 

And these young entrepreneurs know it…

• After graduating into the pandemic, Allie Cohen started designing and selling custom college blankets for $88 each (she smartly avoids logos for copyright purposes). Today, she sells 1k+ each year as the founder of Creative Jawns, per BI, a six-figure business that now includes $300 bed-party boxes.
• In 2020, high schooler Chase Turnof gifted his sister a bottle of sparkling cider that he’d bedazzled for her bed party. By 2023, he’d turned it into a Shopify business, College Bling Bottles, selling up to 40 a day at $60 a pop and expanding to other products like shot glasses.  
• Alex Posner, 25, started baking college-themed cakes following the popularity of one she made for a friend’s bed party. Seeing continued demand, she eventually gave up her med school dreams to run her Dotcakes brand full time. Now during their busy season, she reportedly sells ~200 cakes a week, priced between $55 and $300, and just 40% of orders are college-related. 

BTW: As some students celebrate the school they’ll be attending, many are also celebrating the ones they won’t — college rejection parties are a thing now, too.