 |
|
|
|||||
Since its founding in 2004, the trampoline-based indoor play space Sky Zone has turned the idea of going into a room and jumping around into a thriving business. Through franchising, the company has expanded to more than 200 locations and has more than 40 million visitors per year. But recently, executives at the company have been hearing from parents that while the jumping, bouncing, and inevitable falling is great for energy-filled kids and adolescents, it’s all a bit of a hazard for the youngest children. “Something that kept popping up was parents of the littlest of our Sky Zone jumpers being a little uncomfortable at times in our parks,” says Caitlin Shufelt, SkyZone’s former head of strategy. Sometimes trampoline parks like Sky Zone can be more than uncomfortable. Thousands of injuries have been reported at trampoline parks, from bumps and bruises to broken bones and brain injuries. Some personal injury law firms even specialize in trampoline park accidents. Sky Zone does have safety regulations, including minimum weight requirements, for its attractions, but accidents happen. This got Sky Zone’s leadership thinking about how to better serve the toddlers who might not be ready to ricochet off an angled trampoline or do a backflip into the Foam Zone. That led the company to create Cloudbound, a new indoor playspace for children 6 and under. A spinoff company now led by Shufelt, Cloudbound will open its first two locations later this year. There appears to be room for growth in the indoor playspace market. A report from Allied Market Research estimated the global market for trampoline parks at about $885 million in 2023, and growing to $1.5 billion by 2035. Family entertainment centers are expected to be a $100 billion market by 2032. Focusing on providing open, unstructured play that’s developmentally appropriate for very young children, Cloudbound’s playspace is a whimsical jungle gym with spaces and structures that small children can crawl through, climb up, and slide down. Shufelt calls it “a playground crossed with a children’s museum.” To come up with the design approach, Sky Zone’s team worked with museum and experience designers JRA Design, part of the entertainment-focused design group RWS Global. Together they developed a concept and theme that imagines children playing up in the sky. [Rendering: Cloudbound] The playscape has four zones, each with elements that will be accessible to children across the 6-and-under age range. The first area is referred to as Rising Above the Clouds, where children enter the cloud theme through a hot air balloon. There’s also a climbable treehouse, a “weather zone” featuring sensory experiences like a wind wall, and an obstacle course they call the Castle in the Sky. The space will have no trampolines. The overall design aesthetic is clean, pastel, and modern, which Shufelt says is an intentional difference from the more activity-centric indoor playspaces on the market. It’s also a design choice that aims to appeal to an often overlooked customer base: parents. “Between snack times, nap times, and temperamental little kids, parents are looking for an option that they can spontaneously drop into, and then also not feel miserable while they’re there, with chaos, wall-to-wall older kids jumping around, and a vomit of primary colors on the walls,” Shufelt says. Cloudbound’s design prioritizes safety, sightlines, and crowd control, and augments the parent experience with a café and abundant seating both inside the play area and on its edges. The space includes party rooms, nursing rooms, family restrooms, a quiet room, and stroller parking. Cloudbound’s playspace makes up about 60% of the space. Rather than segregating activities by age range, Cloudbound differentiates its offerings by four developmental stages, each of which may be reached at different ages, depending on the child. Shufelt refers to the stages as crawlers, walkers, little climbers, and confident climbers. “As long as they have the physical ability to do it, they can,” she says. “It’s safe for any age.” This approach was developed in consultation with Jennifer Jipson, a professor of child development and psychology at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo who advises companies like Nick Jr., Fisher-Price, and Magna-Tiles. “We have to trust children and families to kind of find their own path in those settings. If an area feels overwhelming or unsafe, they’re going to gravitate towards a different area,” Jipson says. “It doesn’t have to be the designers who regulate that.” Cloudbound’s design is intended to create opportunities for children to play and explore while pushing their own limits. The sky theme is a layer on top of the physical play elements, rather than a set storyline or sequence children must follow. “It’s a very hard thing to be intentionally unstructured,” Jipson says. “With younger kids, I think it’s very, very important to think about subtle behind-the-scenes guidance, so that it’s guided, playful learning in a way where the guidance isn’t suffocating.” The first two Cloudbound playspace locations are now under construction, in New Rochelle, New York, and Washington D.C., and should open this fall or winter. Two other projects have signed leases, but the company isn’t yet revealing their locations. Like Sky Zone, the plan is to refine the model and then franchise the Cloudbound concept across the country. Pricing hasn’t yet been finalized, but will likely run on a monthly membership. Shufelt says the hope is that Cloudbound becomes a place families with young children come to again and again, instead of just as a one-off for a birthday party. “Novelty grabs attention but familiarity drives skill progression. The more comfortable a child feels in a certain setting, the further they’ll push themselves,” she says. “We’ve designed Cloudbound to be inviting for all developmental maturities and stages.”
Category:
E-Commerce
The question of what people need from their leaders has many answers. However, recent Gallup research found that respondents from 52 countries were asked to list three words describing what positive leaders add to their daily life, hope emerged as the primary need, cited by 56% of respondents. Trust followed at a distant second with 33% while compassion (7%) and stability (4%) lagged far behind. According to the research, followers are significantly more likely to say they need to see hope in those who lead organizations (64%) than among other leaders who might work within the same organization, e.g., managers (59%) and colleagues (58%). In other words, the more senior a leader is within an organization, the more followers look to them for hope and inspiration. At first, the results were somewhat surprising to Jim Harter, Gallups chief scientist of workplace management and well-being, who thought stability might have led the list. However, once he started digging into the answers and the discussion points in the survey, hope made sense after all. I think that it’s hard to have a sense of stability if you can’t see the future. And I think that’s why hope is so foundational, he says. During the last recession, he was doing research about how people felt about their standard of living. The people who felt that they had a leader who encouraged their development had a much more positive view of their standard of living and their future, he says. When people have a concept of where they’re headed, that’s part of hope. Hope is active, not passive Perhaps predictably, Lindsay Recknell says she wasnt at all surprised at this research. The self-named expert in hope and host of the Hope Motivates Action podcast, Recknell consults with businesses about the power of hope in the workplace and how to cultivate it. Recknell says that while hope has many meanings depending on context, she focuses on the hope theory, which was developed by the late C.R. Rick Snyder, a psychology professor at the University of Kansas. Recknell describes hope theory is a formula that defines hope as goals (what we want to achieve or have happen) plus agency thinking (our motivation or the intrinsic why for doing something), plus pathways thinking (our ability to overcome obstacles to the outcome we want). She finds defining hope in this way is particularly useful and effective during periods of uncertainty. A leader can go to their team member and say, Stuff is really hard right now. Let’s focus on what we can control. Well, what can we control? You can control your goals, your desires, your dreams, the things that you want to work on, that you want to take action toward. All of a sudden, when somebody has something to look forward to that’s already kicking off the hope cycle, that’s already kicking off this idea of creating a future better than today, she says. Organizational psychologist Aymee Coget, author of Happiness for Humankind Playbook: Sustainable Happiness in 5 Steps, says the absence of any of those three components can lead to hopelessness. The leader’s job is to create all three, and the person needs to have goals that they’re aware of and they buy into that are realistic for them, she says. They have to have a pathway. Cultivating hope Harter says that the research unveiled other leadership actions and behaviors that are linked to hope in the workplace. One item we ask about leaders that I think links really strongly to hope is whether people feel that their leader makes them feel enthusiastic about the future, he says. Part of that is helping people understand what their role is and helping them set and understand tangible and realistic goals that will help their situations change. Another aspect is to help them connect to the purpose in their work. To have hope, people need resources to do the workthat’s the agency partand they need a larger purpose to connect their work to. People find purpose in many different ways, but I would argue it’s a basic human need, he says. Recknell also makes a distinction between hope and optimism, saying that, while hopeful people and optimistic people both look toward a time when things will get better, hopeful people put in the work to make that happen. Harter echoes that sentiment. Hope isn’t just telling people things are going to be great, it’s helping them see how they can be great and how they can be in tough times, how they can be a part of defining the future instead of being victimized by the present, he says.
Category:
E-Commerce
At the Ben & Jerrys factory in St. Albans, Vermont, thousands of gallons of ice cream waste are now being turned into biogas, creating energy for the states electric grid. When factory workers start to produce a new flavor and switch the machinery from, say, Cherry Garcia to Chunky Monkey, they have to push all the leftover ice cream out of the pipes and rinse them with water so that the flavors dont intermingle. That creates a lot of waste that cant be sent to wastewater treatment plants. Previously, hundreds of tanker trucks would haul that ice cream waste away from the factory. But now, that waste travels right from Ben & Jerrys through an underground pipe to a facility outfitted with anaerobic digesters. [Photo: PurposeEnergy] Anaerobic digesters function like an artificial gut, says Eric Fitch, CEO of PurposeEnergy, a biogas developer that partnered with Ben & Jerrys to build the new St. Albans facility. Bacteria in the digesters eat organic waste and then release a combination of methane and carbon dioxide. That biogas functions like fossil fuel-derived natural gas, and can even fit into existing natural gas pipelines. PurposeEnergy and Ben & Jerrys have had a long relationship; PurposeEnergy also has a facility in South Burlington, Vermont, where Ben & Jerrys used to truck some of its ice cream waste. (Back in 2020, Vermont banned food waste from going to landfills, where it can create methane emissions.) The two companies began working on the St. Albans facility back in 2021, figuring out a feedstock agreement. Construction for the plant began in 2023, and its now sending electricity to the Vermont grid. Though the two companies partnered on the facility, and a pipeline directly connects Ben & Jerrys to the anaerobic digesters, ice cream waste isnt the only feedstock being turned into biogas. The PurposeEnergy facility also gets organic waste from a few nearby breweries and other sources, and is permitted to handle 50,000 gallons of organic waste a day. Currently, Ben & Jerrys contributes some 6,000 gallons a day from its ice cream operations. [Photo: PurposeEnergy] With all of that organic waste, PurposeEnergy can produce about a megawatt of electricity for Vermonts grid, enough to power 1,300 homes. Now that the ice cream waste can travel by pipe to become biogas, Ben & Jerrys can also make 600 fewer truck journeys a year, reducing the company’s carbon emissions. The biogas plant also reduces phosphorus pollution. Food waste is full of phosphorus, which can run off into the environment and cause issues like algae blooms. The PurposeEnergy facility binds that phosphorus with iron, creating iron phosphate, which can be used as a fertilizer that won’t run off in the rain. The PurposeEnergy plant also recovers thermal energy from its operations to heat the digesters. Biogas is considered renewable because it doesnt take any carbon out of the ground like fossil fuels do. Instead, that carbon came from the atmosphere. Some plant, through photosynthesis, absorbed that carbon, and then either that plant ended up as waste, like it might at a brewery, or it was eaten by an animal and converted into, say, milk that went to an ice cream factory and ended up as waste, Fitch says. When that biogas is burned, the carbon goes back into the atmosphere, but it doesnt increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere since it came from there in the first place, Fitch says; its just part of the carbon cycle. But some environmental experts caution that biogas reinforces our dependence on fossil fuels. They also say that renewable natural gas made with organic waste, can still come with a lot of the same environmental hazards of fossil fuel gas, like methane leaks from pipelinesand delays the transition away from power production that doesn’t involve burning any gas at all. Proponents argue that biogas can play a role in reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. And because it is equivalent to natural gas, it fits into the current system. We can take renewable natural gas and we can put it in the same natural gas infrastructure that’s going to homes and businesses all over the country, all over the world, Fitch says. We don’t have to install any new kind of distribution system.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||