Sara Schiller and the business of getting carried away

One of Sara Schiller’s favorite objects in her meeting space was a large plastic pig. Designed by Marcel Wanders, it served as a table. During a 2009 interview, the animal was holding candelabra; on other occasions, it accommodated flowers or drinks. The corporate meeting had acquired a small barnyard complication.

Schiller had founded Meet at the Apartment to change the way companies gathered. Contemporary art, comfortable seating, food and technology belonged in the same room. People who spent their working lives in conference spaces could try a different setting. The pig was a fairly economical explanation of the proposition.

Years later, as co-founder and co-CEO of Sloomoo Institute, she would invite paying visitors to put their hands in slime. There is a consistent curiosity behind these enterprises: what might people do differently if you changed their surroundings? Her career has moved through hotels, street art, corporate hospitality and hands-on entertainment, with rooms doing much of the connecting.

The absurd object matters in this story. It makes the business woman and the art collector visible at once. A table still needs to hold things. It can also give the people sitting around it something to talk about before anyone opens the agenda. Schiller has repeatedly found work at that intersection.

The dog had an eye for art

The education began outdoors. Schiller and her husband, Marc, had a Weimaraner named Hudson. Walking the dog through their downtown New York neighborhood meant stopping frequently. While Hudson attended to canine business, the humans began noticing the images appearing on walls and streets. A dog walk developed a second purpose.

They started photographing the work in 2001. By Schiller’s account, the growing collection eventually outgrew the computer’s storage, encouraging them to put photographs online. The Wooster Collective blog launched in 2003. Its name came from the SoHo street where they lived, giving a local address to a conversation that soon reached elsewhere.

Artists began sending images. People could discover work they would never happen upon during their own morning walk. The project documented a form of art whose surroundings mattered and whose existence could be temporary. A photograph preserved the encounter, even when the original wall changed. Looking carefully became a shared activity.

Schiller’s interest was in the encounter as much as the image. The work appeared among shops, buildings and advertising, available to whoever passed. Her later projects would charge admission or rent out rooms, but this early experience made a lasting question tangible: how do you help someone enter a world they might otherwise walk straight past?

Seven weeks inside, then the doors opened

In 2006, that question acquired a building. At 11 Spring Street, Sara and Marc helped organize a street-art exhibition with owner Caroline Cummings. The property had long attracted their attention. Cummings let artists work inside it, creating an opportunity to carry its public history into its rooms.

Over seven weeks, artists arrived from around the world. The practical problem, the Schillers later recalled, was making sure early arrivals did not consume every available wall before others got there. Even an exhibition devoted to freedom needed someone to think about the allocation of plaster.

Shepard Fairey, JR and Swoon were among the participating artists. Thousands came to see the show. The building offered a physical gathering place for an audience that had been finding work in the street and through screens. The Schillers later revisited it in the book Eleven Spring: A Celebration of Street Art.

Their publishing also included Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art, released by Taschen in 2010 with Carlo McCormick and edited by Ethel Seno. Its subjects extended beyond a single exhibition. Recording work, inviting people to see it and giving it a longer life in print became complementary parts of the same undertaking.

A temporary exhibition demands a particular kind of hospitality. People must understand where to go and what they are being invited to encounter. Artists need room to work. An audience needs a reason to come. Schiller was accumulating experience in making an idea occupy space.

An MBA, with room for a detour

Schiller’s training also ran through more conventional institutions. She graduated from Bowdoin College in 1992 and earned an MBA at NYU’s Stern School of Business. Her professional background included management consulting and Starwood Hotels, where she worked on branding and the guest experience.

She left Starwood in 2008 and opened Meet. Clients included Chanel and LEGO. Art and design supplied the atmosphere, while the underlying job remained recognizably commercial: provide a place where other people could accomplish something. The host’s taste had to coexist with the guest’s needs.

That combination helps explain why slime was a plausible next venture for her, however unlikely it might sound on a résumé. She had already worked with experience as something you could design, operate and sell. The material changed. The questions about arrival, attention and participation remained useful.

Her partnership with Karen Robinovitz brought a different set of skills into the room. Robinovitz had founded Digital Brand Architects, working with social-media talent. Schiller brought business management and hospitality; Robinovitz brought marketing and talent expertise. Schiller described their overlap as a “Venn diagram.” Building the brand occupied the middle.

The six-month idea that kept going

The friends began playing with slime together in 2018, after Robinovitz rediscovered it through a friend’s daughter. The experiments grew into plans for a public experience. Sloomoo Institute opened in October 2019 in a 12,000-square-foot SoHo space, originally conceived as a six-month pop-up.

The name came from a game circulating in the slime community: replace the vowels in a name with “oo.” Applying the rule to slime produced Sloomoo. Even before a visitor reached the vats, the business had a small linguistic invitation to participate. The institution’s name was already playing.

Inside, handmade slime became material for a designed environment. Visitors could explore textures and smells and make their own combinations. The founders recruited people with experience in slime itself, including Amy, known for Scented Slime by Amy, alongside founding partner Toni Ko, the founder of NYX Cosmetics.

Schiller later recalled a grandmother who initially expected to accompany her grandchildren without joining in. Afterward, the woman wrote that she had enjoyed it enough to want another visit with friends. It is the sort of customer reaction that expands an operator’s understanding of who the customer might be.

Corporate groups also appeared, bringing Schiller’s earlier work back into view. A meeting could now include slime. In her telling, busy hands helped people engage with one another. The practical ambition was familiar: arrange circumstances in which a group can share attention, then see what the people do with it.

What to keep, what to spend

There was a business underneath the splatter. In 2023, Sloomoo welcomed 500,000 visitors across four locations and generated almost $30 million in revenue. Those figures describe a particular year, when the original experiment had become an operating company with a much broader audience.

Schiller’s account of the first build contains a useful detail. The team kept lighting, walls and even dressing rooms left by the previous tenant. They spent instead on custom fiberglass egg sculptures to hold slime. The decision made the experience distinctive without requiring every inch of the property to be newly invented.

“Get it 80% right and go,” is one of her rules for entrepreneurs. Another is to be “fearless without being reckless.” These are compatible instructions when money and time are finite. Choose what the guest will remember, make the place work, and accept that opening day will arrive before perfection does.

Growth brought new versions of that problem. On RocketRez’s Signal podcast, Schiller discussed virtual camps, corporate activities, pricing and the possibilities of licensing and media. An attraction has an experience to deliver today and a business to develop for tomorrow. The playful surface requires a substantial amount of operational attention.

Recognition arrived too. Inc. included her in its 2024 Female Founders list. In June 2025, EY named Schiller and Robinovitz winners of its Entrepreneur Of The Year New York award. The two names appeared together, a public acknowledgment of the partnership behind the company.

“Get it 80% right and go.”

Sara Schiller

A longer route to the next room

There are other ways Schiller makes room for art. In March 2025, the New Art Center in Newton announced that she was preparing to run the Boston Marathon as a fundraiser. Its director, Emily O’Neil, had been her college roommate. A friendship of three decades had produced a fairly demanding invitation.

The center described the coming race as her fifth marathon, all undertaken after 50. Schiller connected the fundraiser to the value of community art spaces and the opportunities they give people to make and encounter work. The woman who had helped fill a building with street art was supporting another kind of open door.

Her public interests extend to the New York Liberty. In 2024 she described following the WNBA and admiring the atmosphere she encountered at a game. Basketball offered another example of an experience assembled from talent, audience and a sense of belonging. The person thinking about the room could enjoy being in the crowd.

By October 2026, Sloomoo had another Boston chapter ahead: a full-size location scheduled for November 14 in a former Hard Rock Cafe. The change of tenant makes a pleasing footnote to Schiller’s career. A room built around one form of entertainment would soon invite a different kind of participation.

Her projects have given strangers several ways to gather: around a wall, a table, a vat. The habits behind them are more recognizable than the materials. Notice what draws people in. Leave space for someone else. Make the invitation legible. And if the meeting could use a pig, there is no particular virtue in pretending otherwise.