Our story
Two mates,
and a lot of Coffee.
Soft Summits is a custom inflatables business built from first principles — every quote answered by a founder, every design produced by our team, every seam welded to a spec we set ourselves.
Meet the team
Two people run this.
That's it. Everyone you speak to is a co-founder. No sales team, no call centre, no "our team will be in touch" — just us.
James Bilton
Co-founder · Design & client
Before Soft Summits, James worked in event promotion in New Zealand. He does every first reply to briefs, runs the 3D render sessions, and gets unreasonably excited about Pantone matches.
"The first 30 minutes of every project is me brainstorming designs with the client. If we can't get excited together, the build's doomed."
Panashe Mukuruva
Co-founder · Production & QA
Panashe ran a large-scale hospitality operation before Soft Summits. He runs production, sets the QA standard every build is tested against, and triple-checks freight before it ships.
"If it can't handle 10 years of resort use, it's not shipping. My job is saying no to builds that look good and fail fast."
What we believe
Four things we don't compromise on.
Commercial grade, always.
Double stitched seams and reinforced PVC is the minimum spec. No thinner material, no residential-grade shortcuts, even on small jobs. If it ships with our name on it, it's built for ten years of commercial use.
A human reads every brief.
Each reply within 48 hours. James or Panashe answers you personally, by name, with actual thoughts on what you sent.
Timelines we'll sign for.
We quote 6–8 weeks because we deliver in 6–8 weeks. If we're ever going to miss a date, you hear about it from us first — not your event planner on the morning of.
Custom is the default.
90% of what we ship was designed from scratch. Off-the-shelf sizes, colours and themes are the exception — not because stock is bad, but because we specialise in the custom experience.
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