The Museum of Ice Cream, which helped kickstart the pop-up museum trend has announced plans to return to NYC with a permanent space. The original version, across from the Whitney Museum in the Meatpacking District, was an instant hit selling 30,000 tickets in less than a week.
It’ll bring its sticky sweetness to 558 Broadway in Soho this fall.
This is no joke, kids. To date, the MOIC has had over 1.5 million visitors in pop-ups in LA, NYC, Miami, and San Francisco and has branched into retail with a Sephora makeup collection, a branded ice cream, plus a children’s clothing line for Target.
It’s Instagram posts have also inspired countless imitations from the avocado-themed CADO to the Museum of Pizza. (Search #MOIC on Insta and you’ll get just under 75,000 posts!)
At almost 25,000 square feet it will have the largest version of its sprinkle pool to date and guests will get treated to 13 brand new installations inspired by ice cream and other desserts, including
- a three-story slide
- a floating table of desserts
- a hall of giant scoops
- a MTA-inspired “Celestial Subway”
- PLUS a hidden “Queen Bee hive”
MOIC co-founder Maryellis Bunn told Fast Company,
“Being able to build out from a cold, dark shell and literally design every square inch of the experience truly is a dream from a creative perspective. We can deliver for the first time a state-of-the-art experience, because we’re able to create every square inch. In a pop-up environment, you can’t really do that.”
But success has a price as the entry fee has more than doubled, from $18 in 2016 to a a triple-scooped $38 when it reopens in SoHo. (MoMA, Whitney & the Guggenheim charge $25, FYI.)
This news comes on the heels of MOIC co-founders Bunn and Manish Vora’s announcement that they were launching a parent company, Figure8. (It has a $200 million valuation and $40 million in its first-round of funding!)
The company will specialize in what the duo are calling “experiums” (a term coin combining “experience” and “museum”) that they’ve trademarked.
Bunn told Forbes.
“For the last three years, we’ve been having conversations about what we create. ‘Museum’ is not the right word and ‘experience’ is not the right word, because an experience can be having a cup of tea, writing a letter or walking outside. So we need to properly define this word for ourselves and for the world. ‘Experiums’ are spaces and places for people to reconnect with themselves and with those surrounding them.”
Has this trend reached a boiling point now. Not according to a statement from Manish Vora,
“MOIC NYC is the first of several flagship locations that will launch in the US and abroad over the next 18 months… tickets will sell out!”
Tickets for the Museum of Ice Cream go on sale October 9, 2019, and are $38.
(Photos, courtesy of Museum of Ice Cream; via Artnet News)
