How Slime Became a Movement: Sara Schiller and the Sloomoo Institute

And today it is my pleasure to speak with a fellow Bowdoin college alumna. I think we were in the same class actually, a classmate. And this is Sarah Schiller. She is the co-founder of the Sloomoo Institute and joining us from I am living in New York now, but I'm originally from Winterport, Maine. So I am a Yes. And I absolutely was going to give you credit for that, Sara. So don't worry. I was going to come back around, but yes, let's start with that. So let's talk to me about your Winterport roots and how you ended up kind of going through Bowdoin and then you've been to other places, but now you're in New York. So give me a little bit of a background on that. Yeah. Well, I'd like to think that being born and raised in Maine, I was born in Brunswick where Bowdoin is, so there's some interesting connection there. But born and raised in Maine has really been one of the most influential parts of who I am. I think I have that sort of down to earthness ability to connect with people that I have carried throughout my years. When I left Bowdoin, I ended up spending a short time in Burlington, Vermont, but then coming to New York City where I had different members of my family. And I like to say either I want to be on the grid in the middle of it all or off the grid in Maine. And I think for me, I probably could never live in suburbia. That seems a little soul sucking. I agree with you. And by the way, I was born in Burlington, so you and I, there's lots of connections. I'm sure that you and I must have intersected because I was in Chip Brewer's class. He was a former Radio Maine guest. He's the one who connected the two of us. You and I must have connected while we were at Bowdoin at some point because I think we were roughly contemporaries. Is that possible? Yes. Yes. But Bowdoin, it's a large enough school and it's possible that we were both kind of off in our own little world studying what we were studying at the time. But was it a big deal for you to come from Winterport to go to Bowdoin? It was a very big deal. I think the thing that impressed me most when I got there was the self-confidence and the presence of a lot of the other students who grew up in an urban environment or had gone to a private school that really encouraged public speaking. And that was something that I had to learn at Bowdoin, but really even I think I learned more afterwards that to have that confidence in your ideas and presenting them and putting them forth. I agree with you. I think that when you, especially if you come from a smaller town and my graduating class, I think we had less than a hundred. So I mean, I went to Yarmouth High School. Yarmouth is not that far from Portland, so it's considerably closer to Boston than Winterport it is. How many people were in your graduating class in your high school? I think we had 60 people in our graduating class and I was the only one to go to Bowdoin. So it felt like I was on an adventurous journey at the time. My older brother had gone to Bowdoin, so I did have a connection. He's five years older than me. And my dad had gone to Bowdoin for a masters in mathematics when Bowdoin had a master's program, which was in the early '60s. Well, I love that you have all of these Bowdoin connections, and yet you still showed up on the campus like, "Hmm, this is going to be an interesting experience. I'm not in Kansas anymore. I need to kind of try to figure out my way with this kind of larger college community." So how did that play into your decision to go on to found the Sloomoo Institute, which has gotten a lot of national exposure? I mean, you're living in New York, you're being interviewed by national news organizations, you're getting national exposure. So you spoke to this idea of having confidence and learning how to speak and learning how to connect. So talk to me about the experience of kind of building your own voice and being able to speak it into the world. Yeah. I think the other thing that being a Mainer and having a lot of freedom as a child, because I think we could go outside our back doors and roam free that was then further fueled by Bowdoin was that sense of curiosity. And that's been a theme throughout everything that I've done is this desire and yearning to learn about new things or to explore new areas and even moving to New York City is at the core of that. I ended up in New York, married. My husband and I lived in Soho, which is just this incredible old neighborhood. And we were walking around one day and discovered a stencil piece of art on the ground. And that piece of art led us to understanding and seeing a whole world of street art at our fingertips. And in the late '90s, early aughts, that was illegal art. So we decided to start to explore and see who are these people? Where are they? What is this about? And we started a blog called Wooster Collective. We lived on Wooster Street and blogs were new and exciting at that time. And we started to connect with street artists from around the world. And really from just a sense of curiosity started to ask questions, why are you doing this? And the answers came back in such an incredible mosaic of personal reasons. People were driven to repossess the public square. There's billboards and advertising that's owned by corporations, but I want my message out there. There was this desire to beautify decomposing spaces. So most street artists do not put art on cleaned and well kept building. It's these derelict buildings that they're trying to beautify. There was the freedom of speech, so these artists wanting to actually get out there and have a voice. There's an intersection with architecture. So how does this piece of art intersect with the architecture that's in the neighborhood? And that was really the beginning of a journey for me where I'm not an art history major. I don't know anything about art, but through curiosity and asking questions and meeting people, ended up understanding and exploring a whole world of art and taking that through the blog to become really a public figure of the street art world. And that led to me being interviewed for films, interviewed for TV, for newspapers, for magazines. And in a really low risk way, rewarded me taking the risk of putting myself out there with my husband, Mark. And I think that experience really shaped me to say like, "You don't have to be an expert in art to enjoy it, to talk about it, to love it, to be passionate about it. You can literally just be passionate and a whole world can open up for you. I think that's a really important thing for people to hear because as somebody whose background, I mean, you and I have a shared interest and background in science and I did not have any art history, although Bowdoin has a very extensive and very well respected art, fine art, art history background. So people can certainly go there and get that type of education. I did not take one of those classes. I mean, I took other liberal arts classes, but never having anything to do with art. So when I first started doing a lot with Portland Art Gallery and doing this video podcast and interviewing artists, that was really what saved me was my curiosity, was my willingness to say, "I really don't know. I don't know what underpainting is. I don't know what gouache is. I don't know what ... " So many art terms. It was a whole other language that I had to learn, but I was, I mean, largely I was okay with it. I was okay with being like, "Oh, this is kind of interesting. I'm enjoying this. " So I love that you bring up this idea of curiosity. Yeah. And I think the curiosity as I moved through the business world, so I went on to get my master's in business and finance and worked for major US corporations. This sort of curiosity and passion continued to be fed by the art world, but ultimately when I left my position at Starwood Hotels and I started my own company was when it really started to take off. And my first business was called Meet Hospitality Services and I reinvented how people meet, how people come together to rethink their company, to brainstorm new projects and new products. And the room and the space that we created was filled with art and it was filled with food that I would consider art, so great food, and realized that I could start to combine my business sense with my love for art and that the two things aren't completely separated. And that passion then, and once you become an entrepreneur, I don't know if you become one, but once you express your entrepreneurship, it's hard to ever go back because it's so addictive. And from there, I ended up starting Sloomoo Institute. And I will tell you the backstory starting Sloomoo because I think it will resonate with a lot of people out there. My husband and I have two girls. My 18 year old daughter was born with a rare genetic syndrome called Angelman Syndrome. And thankfully a symptom of her syndrome is happiness. I think any parent wants their child to be happy, and I have a very happy daughter, but she's extremely limited. She cannot speak verbally. She can't do any activities of daily living, so she can't feed herself or get dressed. And I think if you're a classic overachiever, which I would call myself, having a child that basically can't do anything is very, very humbling and takes a lot of time to process that this is what the world is going to be like for my daughter. When she was seven years old, my husband had massive bilateral strokes. He ended up profoundly disabled, cannot speak, cannot feed himself, cannot do any activities of daily living. So in 2014, I woke up pretty down and out on all different fronts. And my good friend, who we were friends because of our joint love of contemporary art, Karen, also had her own series of personal traumas, the loss of her husband to self-harm, the murder of her cousin in the Parkland school shooting, to wake up one morning and a friend of hers brought over slime. And Karen was playing with her friend's 10-year-old daughter for four hours and realized how much joy and happiness that she received from playing with Slime. And she said to the young woman, "Where can I get more of this? I need to start buying this. " And then she was like, "I got to get this to Sarah and her two daughters." And Karen came over with slime. And that was really the beginning of this healing journey. So, and I'd love to talk about this from a medical perspective, which is really tapping in and getting your positive brain energy flowing from doing something with your hands and connecting your brain to your hands, not on a device, actually looking people in the eye and connecting with other people. And that healing journey, we realized we wanted to bring to the world. So we said, "Let's start Sloomoo Institute." We raised a teeny bit of money. We thought it was going to be a popup for six months and six months later, we now have seven locations in the US. We have had 800,000 visitors in 2025, mainly families coming and our mission is to deliver joy. And it's pretty cool to wake up every day and have that as your job. I do want to talk about your experience in being a young mother and wife and having these two very significant things happen and then making this very deliberate choice to move toward joy because I think that for people I've spoken to who have had these significant experiences, it's not that their life is any easier than anybody else's life per se. Their life is just as challenging because there are legitimate physical constraints and dealing with frustrating health insurance situations and maybe dealing with healthcare systems that are not very forgiving. So those frustrations are very real and very difficult, and you certainly have to go through understanding that your life is going to look different, but there's a place where you could make a decision to go, I guess, grab the slime and make joy out of it. And that's the place that I'm interested to hear about from you and what that looked like as your kind of thinking moved forward. Yeah. I think the easy path would have been probably to just go back to a big Fortune 100 company and have all the comforts in a sense of health insurance and a steady paycheck. But I think I had gotten to the point where I, especially because of what happened to my husband, realizing that the time you spend with someone and the ability to control my own time to a certain degree was more valuable than health insurance or a paycheck. So starting something new gave me the flexibility of choosing, right? Choosing my hours, choosing what I want to do. Little did I know, by the way, it was way more hours than I would have probably had if I did something else. But the other thing is I felt like it would be really soul sucking to go back into a big company where you're part of a sort of a process that's very well established. And I think with Sloomoo, the world was our oyster and we started by saying, "What could you do? Well, you can take off your shoes and walk on 300 gallons of slime. That's really cool." We originally failed at doing it, but then we figured out how to do it and it was super rewarding. We originally said, "We're going to have these sloomoo falls where you put on a poncho and slime dumps on you. " And our first recipes didn't work. We had to shut it down, but we figured out how to make it work. So it felt like a lot of successes that allowed us to use our creative juices and problem solving. And we also brought in two different artists. So a lot of our spaces have art and slimy art installations that are involved and built into the actual experiences. We also did something which was really cool, which I think is difficult for most people to do. We hired a neurodiverse workforce. So in honor of my daughter and my husband, and really to embrace intellectual diversity, we started with one guy, and that one guy has grown to many, many individuals in all of our cities. And what we feel now is even if you're a small business, even if you're an entrepreneur, you can do things that are meaningful to you, that don't make profits and don't necessarily deliver anything, but something to yourself as a person to make you feel good and to give back. And this whole thing, once we started with the first one, it started to make this virtuous circle because once we had someone who, let's say, was on the spectrum greeting guests, then we had parents coming up to us saying, "My daughter just said to me that this could be a place where she could work and she could have a career." And she's never seen anywhere where she felt like she belonged. Having parents come in and say, "This is one of the first places where employees accepted my son for exactly who he was. " We've had field trips come in, teachers with tears down their face saying, "This is the first place where all 12 of my students in wheelchairs could zoom around and do everything." So that really feeds itself, right? Once you go down that path, you're like, "Wow, I'm building something, I'm using my creative spirit to build it. I'm hiring people who are changing the world in their own little way, which are then changing the lives of our guests, which are actually then coming back and changing me as a person, because I'm more patient and more thoughtful and more welcoming." So it really has been this very positive journey, very difficult at times, but you're excited when you wake up every day. At what point did you decide, "Okay, one place is not enough. I need to have these other places, these other cities, and we want to bring in these 800,000 people from all kinds of different backgrounds." Where was the turning point where you considered expansion? We knew on the first day that we opened that we were onto something, we had 3,000 people show up the first day. And I think this is the downside of being an entrepreneur is that you have to keep building things and it is addictive. So we opened in October of 2019 and shut down in February of 2020 with the pandemic, but we had already knew we wanted to grow and to bring this to other cities. And during the pandemic, we really spent the time to do the strategic planning and the strategy work about what the business might look like and go out and raise a Series A round of capital that allowed us to open the next two locations. And once we did that and we saw that those were successful, we continued every year now to open another one and grow on it. So if I'm a parent and I have a child who I think would benefit from going to the Sloomoo Institute, what can I expect that my child's experience might be like walking through the door? So most kids say it's the best day of their life because kids love slime. They love, love, love slime. One of the other things that I think is unexpected is that they find their parents actually paying attention to them because if you're playing with slime, you're not on your phone. And rarely do parents and children have time together unless you're very strict about your meals or other times. Most families are now on devices when they're together and these kiddos are seeing their parents put their phone away and actually connect with them and have fun. I think they're also seeing their parents have joy and in any time it's tough to be a parent and parents are pretty stressed out. So having that moment of true joy and true fun and to actually see them play is rewarding right back to the kids. The kids love every single element of Sloomoo that we've put together. So inside the experience, there's these just mind boggling things like you can put your grownup behind a piece of plexiglass and slingshot slime at them. That is truly every kid's dream is to slingshot slime. They don't know it yet, but once they see it, they lose their minds. As I said before, they can walk on Lake Sloomoo, so taking off their shoes, running around on a lake of slime. We have some other really fun moments like a custom DIY slime bar. So you can choose your base, you can choose your scent. We have a wall of scents. You can go up and smell everything from classics like birthday cake or chocolate chip cookie to new baby or dirt. So you can go choose your scent, choose your color, and then end up mixing together your own slime. And people really, really take a lot of thought and consideration about what they're putting into their concoction and what it means. And again, even connecting with their parent, "What did my parent choose? Why did they choose it? " And I think people leave having really connected to themselves and to each other. We have a lot of parents who say, "Actually, one just said to me yesterday, I had more fun than my kid and I didn't expect it. So I guess a very basic question for me is, what is slime actually made out of? That is a great question. Slime, this is the science part of slime. Slime is very stem. I call it nerdy girl oriented. Slime is glue that is bound together with borax, which is a mineral. So you take borox and mix it with water, very little amount of borax. So slime is made from glue that's bound together by borax, which is a mineral. You take a small amount of borax, mix it with water, mix it into the glue and it causes the polymers of the glue to stick together. As a public a service announcement for any parents out there, vinegar, white vinegar is what allows the glue particles to become separated again. So if you get slime in your hair or your clothes, you can use white vinegar and water to get it back out again. And as you're thinking about the different things that one can do with slime, I mean, to me, this seems like just a episode of Nickelodeon brought to life and yet there's logistical things that you have to consider. As you were talking about before, if you want to have a waterfall of slime or you want to walk on slime, then there's the dreaming up of these things, but then there's the bringing them to life. Do you work with a chemist or do you experiment or how do you make these things happen? Yeah. So one of the incredible things about creating Sloomoo Institute is that we made something that never existed before. So it helps because you can make a lot of mistakes and no one can say, "I told you so because no one's tried." We've made a lot of mistakes along the way. We work with industrial engineers who have helped us with design. We've worked with architects, we work with fiberglass manufacturers. So our team is super cool and really interesting that have come together to help us build the exhibits. We also have in- house our head of Slime who started working with us when he was 14. We used to buy slime from Chase and when he was 15, we needed help on the weekends because we had opened up and we had all of these people we never expected to have such demand. So we said, "Chase, can you come in and help make slime on the weekends?" And he's like, "Hold on. I have to ask my mom." And his mom said yes and he jumped on a bicycle and bicycled over to Sloomoo and started working with us. Fast forward when he was about to go to college, we're like, "Chase, you should come work with us. You are designing slimes, you're creating different new chemical formulations. You should skip school for a year and come and work with us." And he's like, "Will you guys meet with my mom and tell her about this opportunity?" Which we did, and she agreed. So we have this incredible head of slime, Chase, who has now been working with us for over six years, and he does all the recipes and the designs. And with seven locations, in order to have consistency, you really have to create these products that can be replicated across the system. And he's been critical to that. Sara, where did you come up with a name for your institute? So Sloomoo is actually the slime name for Slime. So there was a trend online in 2017 where you got your slime name by replacing the vowels of your name with double O. So Sarah, I'm Soo Roo, you are Loosoo, and Slime became Sloomoo. So we always knew we wanted to be more than Slime. And Slime is definitely the reason people come and people love it, but we believe that we're tapping into four of your senses. So our wall of scents in a sense has nothing to do with slime, but triggers memories from what you're smelling and triggers your imagination when you see some of the different names and smells. So we have different components of the experience that go way beyond slime. And so Sloomoo made sense. Sloomoo is also a character and a species. So you can get your best friend, your Sloomoo best friend in the experience by tapping in and figuring out what your charm is. And when you put your charm into the slime, it emerges as your BFF. And we are launching a graphic novel that brings this whole story to life. So there's a lot of storytelling behind the brand and with the characters that we hope people will tap into when they think about Well you just answered my final question, which is where do you see this all going? And it sounds like it's more than just a place That people can go to have an experience with a product. There's a whole narrative arc that you're engaging in from what you're saying. Exactly. Yeah. So we're building exhibits around the characters now. We just launched something called Sloomoos Style Studio and our charms that we have with the slime now have little holes in them. So you can buy a necklace and upcycle the charms and put them on and wear them. So we're taking the characters and we're bringing them to life and the experiences. And then we're bringing the characters to life now in our graphic novel. Who knows, maybe in an animated series or Sloomoo Live, a dance party in Madison Square Garden. We now have a sonic journey, we call it, that you can find us on iTunes or Spotify. So we have custom music that we've made that people can tap into. So we're enjoying all the different components of what Slomoo could be. But at the core of it, it's this hands-on, roll up your sleeves, connect with the slime and play and feel joy. So Sara, if you had a chance to talk to your younger self, either growing up in Winterport or maybe when you were a student at Bowdoin, is there anything that you would say to that younger Sara self about the future and things that either have helped you along the way, an approach that has been useful as you've continued this interesting twisting path of a journey that you've been on, or things that maybe you would do differently? I think the one thing that I wish I'd had when I was younger is the ability to tap into fearlessness. And I say fearlessness without recklessness, but that confidence and that embracing of uncertainty. When you embrace uncertainty, that fearlessness is really freeing. And once you're free from a lot of that stuff, you can really build things and grow. And Sloomoo is the epitome of that example, creating something that's never been done before, that we now have the seven locations. We should have a million visitors this year. We'll have 400 employees and we've built something. And I think when I was younger, fearlessness really constrained me. And now when you start a business in your late 40s, it's actually really freeing. You can be fearless. And I would say to anyone who's saying, "Should I start something?" Or, "I want to start something, but it's really freeing to say, I am going to start something or I am going to do something and this is what I'm doing today." And once you take that step and you get a little bit of reward from it, that's the addictive fun part. Just as an outside observer, the fact that you had a child who was born a little bit different, you had a husband who went through something pretty significant and the fact that rather than saying, "Well, the easy path would be to take a corporate job with health insurance," it seemed like at that point you were tapping into your fearlessness and your self-confidence if you decided to go in that other direction. So do you think that you learned fearlessness in the time in between being younger at Winterport or a Bowdoin College or the time that you decided to make this decision? 100%. And it's something that you can learn and that's a really cool thing. You don't have to be born with it. And I do think it's something that as we get older, we tend to often not try new things and go inward and really pushing to try new things and go outward, no matter if it's something small or something big, can really have meaningful, meaningful impact to you as a person. I will give you an example of how that has then extended. Five years ago, I've always been an athlete. I was an athlete at Bowdoin. I woke up and decided to start running marathons and this came out of the pandemic and we couldn't go anywhere. So five years later, I've now run six marathons and have been able to travel all over to run. And it's something that everyone says to me, "Well, I can't run." And I always say, "You can't run yet." You just have to choose to wake up and say, "It sounds really unbelievably and hard and I'm scared, but I'm going to try it. And so I feel like this mindset has now permeated a bunch of different parts of my life all to the benefit. Well, I really appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule as you're continuing to grow your business and be creative and train for marathons and all the things that you're doing. But I really appreciate your taking the time to have this conversation with me today, Sara. It's been good to, I think, understand how it's possible to bring something into being that if you settled on your rational mind, you might question. If you can bring slime into the public space and make people want to come see it to the tune of a million people a year and also create a book around it, I think that anybody who says, "Well, I can't do that. " That doesn't seem possible. I think you could say, "Ah, I beg to differ." So for me, this has been a really powerful conversation, so thank you. Thank you so much. Great to talk to you. Good to talk to you too. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle. You've been listening to or watching Radio Maine, our video podcast, where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. Today we've been speaking with Sara Schiller, who is the co-founder of the Sloomoo Institute. And at some point, Sara, I will find myself in New York or one of your other locations that I will definitely be stopping by. Please do. It'll be fun to see things brought to life that we've been talking about. Yes. Thank you.