Still, I wanted a photo.Īlthough the room is pretty, I sensed how things could go wrong once people swarmed the place.
#COLOR FACTORY HOUSTON INSTALL#
The team didn’t install a camera in the hall, however, because it’s meant to be a thoroughfare. It’s shiny, naturally lit, and rough all at the same time - it begs to be photographed.
It incorporates glass within the fence to play off iridescence. A hallway decorated with a hanging chain link fence, for example, came from New Hampshire-based artist Soo Sunny Park. The rooms in Houston vary, and the ones I saw under construction all seemed designed with a photo in mind. Hairy confetti, it seems, isn’t cute for Instagram You will experience art in the Color Factory more intimately and more powerfully, more interactively, than any other place on the planet.” “We truly give you an experience that you go through with the artwork. “So you don’t have that thing pinging in the back of your head being like, ‘This isn’t an experience, they said an experience.’” Some of the competition, he says, give more of a marketing message than anything else. “We deliver what we say we’re going to,” he says. Still, Lind really thinks Color Factory epitomizes the word experience. You’re not just getting a photo, but a place to spend time and bond with friends and family. Lind also says it’s all about the experience, which is what Color Factory’s competitors say, too. They commission artists, showcase local food vendors, partner with museums, and somewhat limit the brands that can take over a room (although other pop-ups do similar things). With steep competition in the space, Color Factory’s team sees themselves differently. The Houston location cost “seven figures” to build, according to Lind, but could theoretically bring in $35,000 a day, and that doesn’t even account for merch. The space allows up to 1,000 visitors a day, and it costs $35 for adults to enter and $28 for kids. The new spot is 22,000 square feet filled with 14 art exhibits, including pop-up staples like a new NASA-branded ball pit, a room lit with neon signs, and another room that rains confetti. None of the big names have laid claim to Texas yet, though. “We wanted to plant a stake in the ground and learn about this market.”Ĭolor Factory already exists in New York City, and previously had a location in San Francisco, as does some of its competition, like the Museum of Ice Cream and 29Rooms. “We chose Houston intentionally because we want to own the South,” says Color Factory CEO Jeff Lind. The duds failed, but the bigger names raised lots of money, and now, the US is experiencing a pop-up land grab with companies spending millions to build flagship locations around the country.
Photo-oriented pop-ups, like the Dream Machine and the Rosé Mansion, once seemed like a novelty doomed to fade out, but the opposite has happened. This Houston location, which opened last week, is Color Factory’s first foray into the southern half of the United States, and the first well-funded, Instagram-baity place to make its way to the state for good. That’s how intense people are when they interact with artwork. Malhotra says her team even instructed the fabricators in one room to make the art display “elephant-proof.” “Imagine an elephant running into here,” she says. “We’ve learned from the last two locations that if they can touch it, they will,” CMO Alison Piepmeyer adds. “There’s only so much you can anticipate,” Tina Malhotra, chief experience officer at Color Factory, tells me from the company’s newest location in Houston, Texas, where she and her team have been working for the past 10 months to not only develop a new location near the Museum District, but also make sure it’s their most human-proof one yet. The Color Factory team has seen what humans will do to a place. But there are exceptions: the ones that’ll write nasty things on your walls, tangle their hair up in your confetti, or chip your acrylic pegs that form a life-size Lite-Brite to create, essentially, pretty daggers. Sure, most of the tens of thousands of attendees will get through the 14 rooms of photogenic eye candy just fine.
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