How to Start a Play Cafe
How to Start a Play Cafe
Cafes no longer have to only serve coffee and tea drinks to draw people in. A variety of additional services attract customers to new coffee shops. One of these options is a play cafe that includes an indoor play area for kids to use while adults supervise nearby and enjoy the cafe’s food and drinks.
Before diving into creating your own play cafe, you need to create a business plan and choose equipment options for the play area. With careful planning, you can see the opening day for your play cafe!
Table of Contents
- What Is a Play Cafe?
- Benefits of Play Cafes
- Examples of Playgrounds for Play Cafes
- Steps for Starting a Play Cafe Business
- What Kind of Playground Equipment Do You Need?
- How Soft Play® Can Help You Start Your Play Cafe
What Is a Play Cafe?
A play cafe gives caregivers and their kids a place to socialize, enjoy tasty food and drinks, relax, and meet new friends. Outdoor playgrounds are often a place for caregivers to bring their kids to play, but these sites are not available during rainy, very cold or very hot weather. Play cafes provide a solution for adults with kids to meet other caretakers and have a climate-controlled place for their kids to play throughout the year and in any weather.
While traditional cafes typically cater to adults without kids, play cafes welcome kids and the adults who care for them. Cafes for all ages welcome the energy kids bring to a play area. So, caretakers who visit will feel comfortable bringing their kids to these family-friendly destinations.
In a play cafe, you will find all the elements of a cafe plus an indoor playground for kids to enjoy. When creating one of these businesses, you will need to first focus on all the elements of having an attractive cafe with food and drinks. Then, you can design a play area that meets the needs of the ages of kids who come to the site. For example, if you want a toddler-focused cafe, advertise as such and offer play elements for younger kids. If you want to cater to kids over 5, you will need equipment designed for the play needs of those older kids.
While a play cafe has multiple factors to consider when building, the reward will be a location where kids and caretakers in the community can come together.
Benefits of Play Cafes & Indoor Playground Equipment
Play cafes provide several benefits over traditional cafes or outdoor playgrounds. Combining a play area for kids with food and drinks for their caregivers can net you the following perks:
1. Gain Year-Round Clientele
Outdoor playgrounds can get too hot during the summer, too cold in winter or too wet to play during rain or snow events. Your indoor play cafe will give you a place to provide kids in the area with a place to play all year long. During cold weather, kids and adults can enjoy hot chocolate or other warm beverages, and they can get lemonade or other cooling drinks during the summer from your cafe.
2. Offer Food and Fun in One Spot
Restaurants frequently have indoor playgrounds because they combine the convenience of a place to eat and relax with the fun of an indoor play area. Attract customers with your delicious offerings and encourage them to come back with an enticing play space. Or, use the playground as a way to attract visitors who will then purchase drinks and snacks.
3. Encourage Active Lifestyles for Kids
Indoor play keeps kids active all year long. Your play cafe encourages kids to see activity as a fun way to spend time. They can become more physically fit and develop mind-space coordination when they engage in active play.
With an indoor play area, kids and their caretakers can learn that just because weather conditions may keep them indoors does not mean that they have to stay on their phones or play video games all day. Your play cafe can serve as a healthier alternative to screen time that keeps kids active.
4. Create Social Connections
Kids and their caregivers should have places to go where they can form social connections. When kids visit your play cafe, they can make friendships with people outside their typical social circle. This widening of friendships can boost their ability to communicate with others and build their social skills.
Caregivers, too, can find others with kids to talk to while they supervise their youngsters in your play space. With the casual atmosphere of a cafe, adults have the chance to also relax and build friendships.
5. Have a Standout Business That Offers Something Different
Play cafes exist around the world, but they are not in every community. By opening one, you will likely offer your neighborhood something it does not have. With such a unique cafe offering, you will stand out from your competition as both a play destination for kids and a cafe for the community.
Explore Indoor Play Structures
Examples of Playgrounds for Play Cafes
Several play cafes have successfully opened across the United States. The following are some ideas from existing play cafes that encourage kids to come and play for you to take business inspiration from:
Separate Toddlers and Older Kids With Dedicated Play Areas
Daycare centers and schools keep kids 4 and younger in a separate group from their older peers. Some play cafes do the same to protect both groups of kids and encourage each age set to have more fun.
One example of a play cafe creating different spaces for younger and older kids is the Bumblebee Play Cafe in Elgin, Illinois. This play cafe provides visitors with different play spaces for babies, toddlers and older kids. Separating the kids into different play spaces lets smaller kids use play structures suited better to their smaller sizes. Older kids don’t have to worry about younger kids getting in the way of their play session, either.
Provide Stations for Quieter Play
Not all kids will want to immediately engage in active play on a playground structure. While your indoor play area will serve as a major attraction for your play cafe, remember to include places for kids to relax and have quiet fun. At Kidcadia Play Cafe in Dearborn, Michigan, the attractions include toddler and older kid play structures plus imagination stations. These stations feature a board with neon-colored markers, sensory boards along a wall, a giant light board with colored pins to arrange and tables for drawing.
Host Parties
Don’t forget that your play area will attract kids. Offer birthday parties to reach more kids and their caregivers. This is one strategy that The Village Play Cafe in Chatham, New Jersey, uses. They offer birthday party packages to make planning a party easier for caretakers. These packages provide food and drinks from the cafe and playtime on the indoor playground. The Village Play Cafe has extra party hosts for each event, so if you choose this option, include staff members to handle the booking and hosting of parties.
Use Wristbands for Adults
Depending on the size of your indoor play area, you may need to plan how to keep track of adults who come with kids. One site, Cafe O’Play in Stow, Ohio, regulates who can enter the play area by giving caregivers a wristband to show that they are accompanying a child into the play zone. Kids without an adult cannot enter the play area, and adults without a wristband can’t go into the play space. This regulation ensures each child has a responsible adult to supervise them while in the play area.
Some indoor play locations also give kids and their caregivers corresponding wristbands with a matching code on them. You can then have a staff member check that a caregiver and a child leaving your location have matching wristbands.
Add Seating Next to the Play Area
Be sure to require adult supervision of all kids in the play area — caregivers should keep a close eye on their kids as they play. To make supervising kids easier on adults, the Outlets at Tejon in California uses stools and counters surrounding the play area.
This outlet center placed its play area next to the food court, creating a similar arrangement to that found in a play cafe. The counters offer adults a place to enjoy their food and drinks while keeping their kids on the indoor playground within sight.
Steps for Starting a Play Cafe Business
If you feel ready to open a play cafe, you need to do a lot of planning before you can open the doors. With good planning, you can increase the chances of success for your business by meeting the specific demands of kids and their caregivers in your community for a place to socialize, dine and play.
1. Begin With Market Research
Start market research to find out whether a play cafe will work in your community. You need to know who lives in the area and the existing cafes where you want to open because your success depends on it. For example, if you want to open in an area with a large demographic of single, childless adults, you may not have as much success as opening in a suburb filled with families. Similarly, don’t open a play cafe near another play cafe.
2. Put Together a Business Plan
Decide how you want to run your business. This involves creating a business plan and thinking through some other aspects of your business, like:
- Target audience: First, choose the ages you want to target. For instance, do you want to focus on playtime for toddlers and their caregivers or school-aged kids up to 12?
- Theme and branding: You can also pick a theme for your play cafe. The theme could be a topic, such as fantasy, or a color scheme. Since you will use this design throughout your play cafe to unify the different areas of the site, choose it carefully.
- The menu: You may change menu offerings over time, but you should choose your initial offerings because they will determine the type of equipment you need. For example, if your play cafe will serve ice cream, you need freezers to store the ice cream safely. Do you want to have espresso drinks and a variety of teas? Include an espresso machine in your business plan.
- Funding and financial projections: How will you fund your play cafe? Do you have personal savings to take care of all the costs? If not, you may need to get a small business loan to help you start your operation. You’ll need a description of how you’ll use those funds and your projections for your cafe.
- Location: You’ll also want to know where your business will be. Choose a site to purchase or lease for your play cafe. Leasing may have a lower upfront cost, but you will continue to pay throughout your tenure. Make sure to have space for both food and drink preparation and a play area. The site should also be easy to access to encourage more people to come.
- Legal logistics: Other factors of your business plan include purchasing insurance and finding out about local permits you need to serve food and drinks or have kids playing on your property.
3. Purchase Your Equipment
Once you’ve finalized your plan, you need to purchase equipment to run your operation. Because your play cafe will have both indoor playground equipment and a kitchen for serving customers, you will need to include all these components in your supplies. The kitchen equipment will depend on your menu.
Source a provider for your food and drinks at this stage. Do you want to sell locally-produced teas and coffees? Find a company willing to work with you, and you may benefit each other through mutual marketing. What about snacks? Do you want to serve chef-prepared foods or simple dishes that most employees can quickly make?
More complex menus will require more equipment in the kitchen such as ovens and stoves for cooking. Simple foods, such as sandwiches, may only require toaster ovens to prep.
Don’t forget about serving ware. Will you serve on reusable dishes? If so, you may need to invest in a larger dishwasher to handle the extra utensils and dishes. If you choose disposable serving ware, consider the investment in the products you will need to make each month.
We’ll go over the play equipment you may need for your cafe in more detail shortly.
4. Hire Your Employees
Staff your play cafe with trustworthy employees who know how to give kids and their caregivers excellent customer service. If you will have parties, consider having host positions on staff for the events. You may need a cashier to handle play area fees and food orders, cooks for preparing foods, and drink makers for preparing coffee and tea orders. You should train all staff to handle working with kids and in their respective roles before you open your shop and conduct the appropriate background checks.
5. Open the Shop
Host an opening day for your play cafe. You may want to offer discounts on opening day to encourage people to try your venue and spread the word. Ideally, they will market your play cafe to their friends through recommendations and the money that you lose through opening day discounts will come back through increased visitors over time.
Be sure to advertise opening day through local businesses, local media outlets and social media to get the word out.
6. Market Your Business
Keep marketing your business. You will constantly have new people move into the area or travel through as tourists who may not know about your play cafe. Promotional events, ads with local publications and television stations, a quality website and a regularly updated social media presence can help you build your play cafe business.
What Kind of Playground Equipment Do You Need?
The type of playground equipment you use for your play cafe is up to you. Find equipment to fit into the amount of space you have and meet the needs of the ages you serve. The following are common types of indoor play equipment you can choose from for your cafe’s play area.
Small Play Areas
Many play cafes start out as small businesses that don’t have as much real estate as larger facilities. Feel free to start your cafe with a small play area. These small footprint structures provide you with a budget-friendly option that doesn’t require a lot of space.
Customizing your small play area gives you the greatest control over the features. One type of popular small structure to customize is the ATOM. While small, the ATOM packs multiple ways to play into the space it uses. Features on the ATOM include musical drums, a diamond obstacle course to the second level, slides, a hammock, a sit-and-spin, ripple platform and a scoop climber.
Wonderscapes offer another way to include both play structures and sculpted foam in a compact space. With four themes available, options include Safari Adventure, Garden Discover, Nautical Quest and Woodland Escape. Each theme includes a specific color palette and animals in its prepared design. Choosing Wonderscapes is one of the fastest ways to pick out a playground for your play cafe.
Soft Sculpted Foam
To make your playground fun and colorful, consider the perks of soft sculpted foam. These pieces appeal to the eye by coming in a variety of designs. You have choices from whimsical animals and characters to abstract designs and semi-realistic sculptures. Adding these pieces gives kids places to climb on while sparking their imaginations. They are ideal additions to toddler play areas because their size works well with smaller kids.
Traditional Playgrounds
Traditional indoor playgrounds are another option you can choose for your play cafe. These play structures have sizes that can fit almost any space you may have.
As with small play areas, classic playgrounds come in a variety of prerendered designs. The difference is the sizes of these traditional indoor play structures. They are larger than small play areas, with two or three levels for kids to play on. Choose from one of the prerendered options for your play cafe’s structure or get inspiration from the designs to customize your own.
Large Play Structures
If you have the space and funds to dedicate to a large play structure, choose from one of the large attractions available. These structures have multiple layers and immediately draw the eye to their size and features.
This type of structure could even be an upgrade after you experience some success and profits with your play cafe after opening. Upgrading to a large play structure lets you allow more kids in the play area at a time, expanding your cafe’s overall capacity.
Customize your large play structure to fit into your cafe. You can choose a long, low design that has a rectangular structure for use along a wall. Alternatively, you may choose a tall structure with a smaller footprint to fit into a corner.
Themed Playgrounds
If your play cafe will have a theme, include a themed playground to match. When it comes to themes, you have several options of prepared choices. Plus, you can customize your own. Existing themed playgrounds include candy land, medieval, kid’s clubhouse, train station, clock tower, ski resort, airport, fruit town, farmland and under the sea.
Install a themed playground in your play cafe to let kids’ imaginations run wild and create a design background to build on for your cafe’s marketing.
How Soft Play® Can Help You Start Your Play Cafe
Make your play cafe stand out with colorful indoor playground options that fit your space and budget limitations. With Soft Play, you get a free design consultation to help you find the right equipment for your new play cafe. Since 1984, we’ve worked to innovate the indoor playground. Today, Soft Play playgrounds are in 60 countries around the world and restaurants across the United States.
Build your indoor playground and cafe experience today with us at Soft Play. Contact us for a design consultation or request a quote if you know the products you want for your playground in your coffee shop.
