Fast company logo
|
advertisement

PREMIUM

Why the Meow Wolf experience offers something Disney never will

A collective of artists got together to build otherworldly, immersive spaces. In the
process, they invented something even wilder: Meow Wolf, a multimillion-dollar pillar of the experience economy.

Why the Meow Wolf experience offers something Disney never will

From left: Meow Wolf cofounders Vince Kadlubek, Sean Di Ianni, and Caity Kennedy [Photo: Maciek Jasik]

BY Aaron Gelllong read

If you happen to visit Convergence Station, the Denver outpost of the popular immersive-art empire Meow Wolf, the staff has one request: Don’t push the emergency call button on the elevator, unless there’s a real emergency. “It happens at least once or twice a day,” says Amanda Clay, the company’s chief exhibitions officer. In the 90,000-square-foot, five-story building, a team of 300 artists has created a series of beguiling, Wonka-esque spaces laced with interactive elements. Doors open into other dimensions. Desktop computers and soda machines are seeded with hidden clues. Sit in a “mech robot navigator” and solve a puzzle, and a laser light show explodes in the vaulted ceiling overhead, a brilliant display known as “opening the wormhole.” But those elevator buttons? They’re mandated by law, and they really do connect to the fire department. “Once visitors start to get into it,” Clay explains, “they think they need to press every button.”

Such misunderstandings are probably unavoidable when your business model is based on upending visitors’ relationship with reality while “giving [them] agency over their experience,” in the words of Meow Wolf cofounder and former CEO Vince Kadlubek. Meow Wolf welcomes attendees to its three surrealist fun houses with a familiar-seeming entry point—a family home (House of Eternal Return, in Santa Fe, New Mexico), a supermarket (Omega Mart, in Las Vegas), or a transportation hub (Convergence Station)—before treating them to a multisensory experience marbled with comic-book, sci-fi, and horror-movie tropes, social satire, and enough tantalizing mysteries to confound Dana Scully.

Meow Wolf has been honing this approach since 2008, when a group of New Mexico–based artists found themselves disenchanted with the so-called Land of Enchantment—in particular, the local art establishment. Pooling their resources, they rented a space, formed a collective, and picked words out of a hat to come up with a name. What followed was a succession of parties, rock shows, and exuberant art installations fashioned from trash scavenged on moonlit dumpster dives. This was standard operating procedure in the DIY scene, where music, art, and theater flourish outside the official channels. The difference is what came next.

The first permanent Meow Wolf space, Santa Fe’s House of Eternal Return, opened in a former bowling alley in 2016, attracting 318,000 visitors in its first year and bringing in $5.35 million in revenue. Its success seemed to catch everyone off guard, not least its creators. “It’s like we went out to learn how to surf and then we found ourselves on a really big wave,” Kadlubek explains, sitting in a booth at the Kenyan restaurant in Santa Fe where he and two of his Meow Wolf cofounders could be found waiting on orders while working as delivery drivers just eight years ago.

advertisement
CoDesign Newsletter logo
The latest innovations in design brought to you every weekday.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Privacy Policy

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aaron Gell is a freelance writer living in upstate New York. Gell is the author of “Friend of the Devil,” Longform.org’s “most clicked” story of 2015, and “Unlucky Charms: The Rise and Fall of Billion-Dollar Jewelry Empire Alex + Ani,” SABEW’s best business feature of 2020 and a Loeb Award finalist More


Explore Topics