It’s been a tad more than 40 years since two Charlotte entrepreneurs helped make the fast-food dining experience a lot more exciting for kids and their often-frazzled parents. Over that period, Huntersville-based Softplay has installed more than 40,000 playgrounds in McDonald’s, Chuck E. Cheese, Chick-fil-A and other venues since its formation in 1984.
The company celebrated its recent anniversary by opening a six-story indoor play area replicating the prehistoric world of dinosaurs in a former IMAX theater in the Thanksgiving Point farm, garden and museum in Lehi, Utah. It relies upon digital wristbands to assist travel between checkpoints and navigate perils from lava chambers to dinosaurs. The nonprofit site bills itself as Utah’s largest science, math and technology learning center.
The use of technology illustrates how the company started by Charlotte entrepreneurs Grant Strawcutter and Neal Crites envisions its expansion in healthcare and other
emerging markets.
Soft Play is in the early stages of exploring how to reach senior citizens with a focus “more on the mental engagement than the physical engagement,’’ General Manager Rich Albright says. He is based in the company’s Mecklenburg County office.
At the start, Soft Play emphasized indoor play spaces where children could slide, crawl and climb on padded surfaces that kept them safe. The first McDonald’s branded playground opened in 1972, and the concept accelerated over the next 30 years. The Big Mac purveyor closed its PlayPlace areas during the pandemic, but some have since reopened.
Describing himself as “a kid at heart,” Strawcutter says he and Crites focused their early designs on minimizing falls and injuries, leading to the development of “play-in” equipment that overcame early wariness by potential venues.
Albright describes his predecessors as “two persistent founders with a great idea who refused to take no for an answer, eventually talking McDonald’s into giving them a chance.”
Digital technology is increasingly augmenting physical play in installations such as the site, which is called Mountain America Jurassic Jungle. “Kids still have the need for physical play, but they’re used to a lot of digital immersive interaction,” Albright says. “Our digital play creates greater degrees of adventure play.”
Indoor play areas at restaurants morphed into demand for installations in a range of properties, such as Simon Property Group shopping malls, churches, entertainment venues such as SeaWorld, the Kennedy Space Center and a casino in California. Its healthcare installations focus on hospitals and children’s hospitals, Albright said.
Dallas, Texas-based PlayPower, the world’s largest commercial playground and recreational equipment manufacturer, acquired Soft Play in 1996. The company has 12 brands, including U.S. divisions such as Little Tike Commercial and Europe’s HAGS Play.
Soft Play builds about 1,000 installations a year, mainly in the U.S. Individual projects cost from tens of thousands of dollars to several million dollars, according to Albright. He declines to provide financial specifics.
The founders still live in North Carolina, Strawcutter in Asheville, Crites in the Lake
Norman area.
Demand for indoor play has snapped back from the COVID-19 downturn when “no one wanted their kids to be playing inside of something that other kids are touching feverishly,” Albright says.
“Our business has bounced back and gone above pre-Covid levels,” he adds. “There’s a resurging drive for parents to have their children do physical play and get out from behind a tablet and actually run and jump and play.”
Play areas also give parents a break from minding their kids. They can sip fast-food coffee while their children engage in what Albright describes as a diversion.
“Here’s a place to have the kids play while mom or dad shops, or you drop the kids off and then you go gamble.” ■
