Sloomoo MiniMoo in Boston.
Courtesy of Sloomoo Institute
Manhattan’s Sloomoo Institute, an interactive museum for slime where more than a thousand kids and adults can be seen elbow-deep in the substance on any given Saturday, is opening two new smaller locations at Faniuel Hall in Boston and the King of Prussia Mall in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Customers will be able to shop for colorful slime and adorable merchandise while partaking in a scaled down version of the experience of full-size locations in Manhattan, Atlanta, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles.
Playing with slime is a cathartic and uplifting experience to hear Sloomoo Institute cofounders Karen Robinovitz and Sara Schiller tell it. Kneading, pulling and twisting the gooey substance into submission and molding it into different shapes frees the mind and leads to creative play and a profound sense of satisfaction, they said.
And slime isn’t just for kids. “Last year, we did a study and it found that 75% of the adults felt better about their day when they added slime play to their lives,” Schiller said. “They felt calmer, more connected to their coworkers and more creative.”
“It’s super-exciting to test a new format in places with serious foot traffic,” Robinovitz said of the MiniMoos. “We’re still going strong in five cities with full-size locations and we’re in the midst of planning two new large scale Sloomoo Institutes for 2026. The leases aren’t signed yet, so we don’t want to jinx anything,” she added, declining to reveal the addresses.
“The other thing we’re working on right now is the expansion and development of merchandise,” Robinovitz said. “We’ve had light merchandise until now, but we’re going all in and developing everything from slime bag charms to really using our characters and coming up with all types of T-shirts and slime boxes, which we’ll be launching next year.”
The new MiniMoo locations will be between 3,000 and 4,000 square feet. “We’ve redesigned all of our retail tables to be very slimy and Sloomoo-esque, so they’re really fun colors and they’re actually shaped like our character, Sloomoo. We’re really paying attention to the retail store experience that you’ll go through, so it’s how we’re merchandising the slime visually.”
Sloomoo is the brand’s adorable shape-shifting mascot, which isn’t round or straight, and isn’t small or tall, but because it’s made of slime, can stretch into any shape at all.
Ticket sales account for 85% of Sloomoo Institute’s business, the rest is merchandise and slime sales. “Part of the reason it’s that size is because we haven’t had the ability to really put a strategic program for merchandise together – we’re still a lean team – but now we are. We’re really going to ramp up the launch,” Schiller said.
Marketing consists of a lot of word of mouth and influencers. “We’re doing some C-TV, Google and Meta and we’ve experimented with a drop of out-of-home in Atlanta,” Schiller said. “We’ll experiment a little bit with radio. We’ve also done some out-of-home in New York and Los Angeles. We’ve done a lot of guerrilla marketing with street teams, and obviously traditional public relations plays a part in it. We get an amazing array of influencers and celebrities who are coming on their own without telling us. We just had Ciara and her family and Serena Williams and her family.”
Robinovitz and Schiller are also launching the Slahmoo Style Studio, a customized jewelry bar based on the character, Slahmoo. “She’s a bit of a diva,” Schiller said.
Robinovitz and Schiller have given a great deal of thought every aspect of each visit to the institute. “When you walk in you get your Sloomoo slime name,” Robinovitz said. “That was inspired by a social media trend in 2017 when people in the slime community – yes, there is a slime community – were saying, replace the vowels of your name with oo and that’s your slime name. You’re Shooroon, That language is Sloomoosh. You can have a whole conversation in Sloomoosh, which is your own secret language when you’re at Sloomoo Institute. It becomes a whole world.”