MUSEUM OF
ICE CREAM

A grown-up jumps into a pool of sprinkles, and nobody finds it strange

On a Tuesday afternoon in SoHo, a line wraps around 558 Broadway. Inside, a banker in a blazer is wading waist-deep through a pool of antimicrobial plastic sprinkles, and three teenagers are filming it. Nobody is embarrassed. That, more than any pint of ice cream, is the product Museum of Ice Cream actually sells.

Ten years in, the brand is no longer a novelty. It is a chain - permanent locations in New York, Chicago, Miami, Boston, and Singapore, with Las Vegas and Los Angeles on the way. Its parent company, Figure8, prefers the word "experium" to "museum," which is the kind of word you invent when you have raised $40 million and need to explain what you are. The honest description is simpler: it is a building you buy a ticket to walk through, eating unlimited ice cream, taking photographs of yourself being delighted.

The skepticism writes itself. A museum with nothing to study. An attraction whose main attraction is the gift shop's worth of photos you generate for free. And yet millions of people have paid, queued, and posted. The interesting question isn't whether it's silly. It's why the silliness keeps working.

Adults forgot how to play, and nobody had built them a permission slip

Here is the tension the founders bet on: somewhere around adulthood, joy gets rationed. We schedule it, justify it, apologize for it. The culture had plenty of places to be impressed, educated, or fed. It had very few places designed only to make a grown person feel like a delighted seven-year-old - in public, on purpose, without a single ironic asterisk.

Maryellis Bunn noticed the gap from inside the machine. Working on forecasting and innovation at Time Inc., she watched a generation pour its attention into shareable moments while the physical world stayed stubbornly un-photogenic. Most spaces were built to be used. Almost none were built to be felt - and then posted.

A 24-year-old and a former banker walked into a pop-up

In 2016, Bunn - then in her mid-twenties - opened a summer pop-up in Manhattan's Meatpacking District. She partnered with Manish Vora, a former investment banker and ex-CEO of the art platform Lightbox, who could translate whimsy into a P&L. Her instinct for the feeling, his instinct for the model. It was, on paper, a seasonal lark.

The lark sold out almost immediately. The wait-list ran into the hundreds of thousands. The bet underneath was contrarian and a little absurd: that an experience built to be photographed wasn't a marketing tactic for some other product - it was the product. Treat the customer's phone as the distribution channel, and the customer becomes the salesforce. Free.

What you actually do in there

The experience is a choreographed walk through themed rooms, each engineered for a different sensation and a different photo. You ride the Creamliner, a 1960s-style airline cabin that only serves dessert. You drift through Pinkmas, a holiday snow globe in the wrong color. You graze treat stations, sip something at the cafe and bar, and eventually arrive at the Sprinkle Pool - the icon, the climax, the thing on the postcard.

The details are the point. The sprinkles are antimicrobial plastic, not sugar, so no, you can't eat them - a fact every guest learns the hard way. There are vegan options, a kitchenette, kids' activities, birthday parties, group bookings. The brand extends past the doors too: a cosmetics line with Sephora, branded pints once sold at Target and Albertsons, and a 2025 home-and-fragrance collaboration with The Hotel Collection.

The numbers behind the pink

Skeptics like receipts, so here are a few. The $40M Series A in 2019 was led by Elizabeth Street Ventures and Maywic Select Investments, with OCV Partners joining - investors who don't typically write checks for art projects. The valuation landed at $200 million. Apollo data pegs estimated annual revenue near $91 million across roughly 340 employees.

The partnerships read like a brand that figured out it wasn't only a venue. Sephora put it on a beauty shelf. Grocery freezers carried its pints. Design studio The Working Assembly rebuilt its identity into the now-signature pink-and-red. Each one is a small proof that the feeling travels - that you can bottle "delight" and sell it somewhere other than the front door.

Selling connection, using ice cream as the excuse

Strip away the pink and the stated mission is almost earnest: reignite childlike joy, imagination, and play - and use those feelings to get people to connect, in person, with each other. Figure8's whole thesis is that millennials and Gen-Z, raised on screens, are starved for physical spaces worth showing up to. The museum is the proof of concept; the "experium" is the franchise.

It hasn't been frictionless. The brand has weathered criticism - including over a 2020 Black Lives Matter installation and workplace concerns - reminders that selling joy at scale is harder than it photographs. A company built on feeling good gets held to the standard of being good, which is a fair trade.

Everyone declared experiential dead. The lights stayed pink.

Every few years, someone announces the death of experiential marketing. The pop-up is over, the trend is exhausted, the selfie is passe. And every few years, Museum of Ice Cream quietly opens another permanent location and proves the obituary was premature. The lesson generalizes well beyond dessert: in an economy drowning in digital, the scarce thing is a reason to leave the house.

Back in that SoHo lobby, the banker climbs out of the sprinkle pool, plastic confetti in his collar, grinning at his phone. He paid for the ticket. He'll do the marketing for free. He had, by every measure he can articulate, a genuinely good time. The museum didn't teach him anything about ice cream. It reminded him he was allowed to have fun - and that, it turns out, is a thing people will line up around the block to buy.

Five things that amuse and inform

• It is not really a museum and holds almost no historical artifacts - the main exhibit is essentially you, enjoying yourself.
• The Sprinkle Pool's sprinkles are antimicrobial plastic, not sugar. People still try.
• Co-founder Maryellis Bunn was in her mid-twenties when the first pop-up opened in 2016.
• The 2016 NYC debut sold out nearly its entire run on launch, with a wait-list in the hundreds of thousands.
• Parent company Figure8 insists on the word "experium," because "themed building with a ball pit of confetti" doesn't fit on a pitch deck.

Interviews and walkthroughs

• ▶ Inside the museum - full experience walkthroughs (YouTube)
• ▶ Manish Vora - founder interviews (YouTube)
• ▶ Maryellis Bunn - on building MoIC (YouTube)

Where to find them