Yesterday I took my daughter to a classmate’s birthday party at a place called Pump It Up. This is effectively a warehouse type space that has been divided into large rooms filled with huge inflatable toys that the kids jump in, around, on, and through. This particular location had two big rooms dedicated to the toys and one smaller room dedicated to food (pizza and cake.)

The business provided supervision in the play rooms and support in the party room following a simple plan of spending an hour in each room transitioning easily and smoothly to the next (each room is connected to the next and there is a handy rolling cubby bin for shoes and other belongings that follows along.) Gifts were collected in a tub at the entrance for the birthday guest of honor. Parallelism of up to 3 events is achieved by staggering the start time of each event by an hour, and this place was packed.

The kids had a great time – and my daughter was exhausted after 3 hours of birthday activity. It’s interesting because it’s a new idea of standardizing the child’s birthday party providing a safe place for kids to be kids. Not quite Chuck E Cheese, a more focused event driven business. It seems to be a franchise and would not surprise me a bit to see it become very large and very successful over time.

That being said, there are a few things that could use some work. The adults were bored silly, a cafe with observation windows into each play arena would be a good thing. The pizza was absolutely horrible, small increases in quality could go a long way in making the experience better. The party room at this facility was small – the space really ought to be a little bigger – commensurate with the arena’s kid capacity. When adding adults in the room, it was very tight. If you have younger children, sooner or later, you’ll end up at this place (or something like it) – one last word of wisdom, bring socks. If not, you’ll get to pony up $2.17 to buy a pair…