To anyone not paying attention, Blueprint Entertainment’s arrival on the European visitor attractions scene might have happened overnight. This time last year, the private equity-backed edutainment operator was barely a blip on the industry’s radar. By the end of the summer, the company had not only taken over and relaunched two high-profile science centres in Germany and Belgium – Odysseum in Cologne and former Merlin investment Earth Explorer in Ostend – but it had also opened a brand new attraction: Explorado Children’s Museum in Duisburg, Germany. Together, the three sites make Blueprint the largest owner-operator of science centres on the continent.
Yet while this may all sound very sudden, the groundwork for these developments was actually being carefully laid for well over a year by the company’s founders: Andreas Waschk, chairman, and Mike Boris, CEO, who set up the business together at the end of 2011.
And while Blueprint itself may be the new kid on the attractions block, Waschk and Boris themselves are far from wet behind the ears.
A one-time concert promoter, Waschk is the founder of AWC AG, a leading German consulting and development firm for leisure and entertainment projects, and now essentially a sister company to Blueprint. As CEO of AWC, Waschk has worked with big-name clients from Merlin to Ripley’s. Boris, in contrast, is a Hungarian investment banker with extensive experience in funding entertainment projects. They met five years ago while exploring potential real estate deals in eastern Europe and immediately established a strong professional rapport. “We started working in a client relationship,” says Waschk. “But [we had] the same opinions; we were looking at this business from a similar point of view.”
At any other time, the meeting of minds might have ended there. But macro-economic circumstances deemed otherwise. “Before the financial crisis, Andy and I advised real estate developers on different attraction projects in Hungary,” says Boris. “When the crisis came, those projects were put on hold. For us that was an opportunity to come up with a different story.”
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The story the pair came up with is one that maximised their skill sets: Waschk’s development and operational know-how combined with Boris’ investment experience and contacts. By getting investors on board before pursuing specific projects, the pair could hit the ground running. “Many edutainment projects are difficult to find the equity for by time the idea’s there,” says Waschk. “That was the advantage I had,” adds Boris. “I have a very good relationship with a wide network of private equity investors.”
With financing in place, Waschk and Boris were free to concentrate on finding and/or developing the kind of attractions they wanted to operate: highly interactive children’s science centres. “There’s no such thing as not being allowed to touch,” says Boris. “You have to touch and try each exhibit to see how it works. We also have a lot of theming, which isn’t usual in classic science centres.”
“Many people in the industry don’t think edutainment exists, but I firmly believe in doing things in an entertaining way [while also being able to] teach, explore and explain,” says Waschk. “That’s our mission. And no one’s ever done a chain of educational science attractions for children before – which is hard to believe, as it makes so much sense, right?”
The strategy for achieving this goal is surprisingly simple: expand opportunistically with one or two sites a year (both acquisitions and new developments) and invest in content; then frequently renew it by moving it through the venues, keeping the offer fresh and footfall high.
According to Waschk, a key problem with publicly funded science centres is the lack of capital available to revitalise the attraction once it becomes tired: “The idea behind them isn’t really economic. You raise the money and get the exhibition as good as you can, but we all know that doesn’t take you further than three or four years before you need a major reinvestment. Investing in content, then rotating it through the venues, was the perfect synergy between Mike and me.”
The idea is that while Blueprint will concentrate on operations, AWC will source and supply the additional content. The consulting and development company has already bought a huge amount of exhibits stock from insolvent operators – “we have two warehouses full,” says Waschk. They hired Brit Adam Sanders, previously business development manager for Natural History Museum’s planning and design consulting department, to collate it. “He’s reorganising the stock into topics, looking into how it can be structured for travelling exhibitions and what kind of IP [rights] we can stick to it,” says Waschk. “That’s all under his control. And it’ll work both ways: we want to bring exhibitions that already exist [into Blueprint venues] and also develop exhibitions that we can take on the road.”
Mouse trap
In addition to stockpiling content, Waschk and Boris spent 2012 seeking out potential businesses and sites for their envisaged chain of edutainment centres. The first deal they were able to close, early in 2013, was Odysseum in Cologne: an 8,000sq m (86,000sq ft) adventure-based science centre with interactive exhibits spread across several elaborately themed areas, including a Jurassic jungle, Earth’s orbit, the inside of a computer and a science laboratory.
First opened in 2009, the attraction held obvious appeal for Waschk, who as CEO of AWC had developed the project on behalf of the investor, Cologne-Bonn Savings Bank, before operating it in a joint venture with SMG Science Center Services. After buying out SMG last year, the challenge for Blueprint was to inject new life into the four-year-old attraction. For starters, AWC oversaw a significant redevelopment of the site, which reopened in July 2013 with a brand new exhibition called The Game: a RFID-based interactive experience that takes the visitor on a journey from the beginnings of human life right up to the present and into the future.
But the real game-changer for Odysseum – and a perfect example of a stated Blueprint aim of forming key relationships with select IP partners – has been the acquisition of one of Germany’s most famous brands: a 43-year-old educational cartoon character called Die Maus (The Mouse). “Outside of Germany it doesn’t mean anything,” says Waschk. “But in Germany more people know it than Coca-Cola; that probably says it all.”
Opened last November and bringing Blueprint’s total investment in the redevelopment up to €2m (US$2.75m, £1.64m), Museum mit der Maus (Museum with the Mouse) offers 1,000sq m (10,760sq ft) of hands-on experiences for pre- and primary-school children. Since the takeover, it’s helped boost visitor numbers at Odysseum by 25 per cent, with 200,000 forecast for 2014.
Helping to bolster these numbers even further is yet another IP coup for Blueprint – the hugely successful Harry Potter: The Exhibition, which opens at the centre this October. Created by Global Experience Specialists, Inc (GES) in partnership with Warner Bros Consumer Products, the 1,400sq m (15,000sq ft) exhibition has been touring for four years, visiting Boston, Toronto, Seattle, New York, Sydney and Singapore. Odysseum will be only its second European venue, following a short stop in Sweden.
Boris admits that the interactive exhibition, which features elaborately themed sets as well as original props and costumes from all eight Harry Potter films, leans more to the entertainment than the education side of Blueprint’s remit – but he doesn’t apologise for it. “We have to strike the right balance,” he says. “It’s true there’s less scientific content in this exhibition, but we expect many of the visitors to Harry Potter will also look into our permanent exhibitions.”
Although Blueprint has clearly revitalised the business, Odysseum was already an established attraction when the company stepped in. By contrast, its next project was a completely new development. Explorado Children’s Museum in Duisburg, Germany opened last June in the former Legoland Discovery Center in the city’s old harbour. Covering 3,000sq m (32,290sq ft), the site is the first of a planned chain of Explorado-branded attractions and very much a testing ground for the concept.
Developed by AWC and aimed squarely at the three- to 11-year-old market, the museum’s essentially an educational playground, where young visitors are invited to dive in and explore, without pressure to perform. Highlights include CleverLabs, Blueprint’s branded science show concept, where children become researchers and engage in hands-on science experiments. Another USP is the Children’s University, which sees scientists from real universities interacting with children as young as five. There’s also space for travelling exhibitions.
So far, the concept is proving its worth, says Waschk, with visitor numbers for 2014 on target for 100,000. This is boosted by the fact that the school authorities have classified the attraction as a fully educational facility, thereby sanctioning any number of school visits. But families are also buying in. “Kids love it, so we’re having a lot of repeat visits,” says Waschk. “And people stay all day.”
explorado
While the Duisburg attraction gave Blueprint the chance to create a prototype for its planned rollout, the company’s next move – the acquisition of Earth Explorer from previous owner Merlin Entertainments last June – was a no-brainer, says Waschk: “Earth Explorer made perfect sense, as it was close to the product we’d have wanted anyway.”
Nor did the fact the attraction had faltered under Merlin, with disappointing visitor numbers, dampen their enthusiasm. “When it started [in 2004], it was pretty successful,” points out Waschk. “But you have to change concept, and Merlin never touched anything in the building after opening, apart from adding one ride. From Merlin’s perspective, [after their takeover by Blackstone] they were able to buy much bigger brands so their focus was simply on that... they just had much better opportunities with Lego and Tussauds.” Even with such little attention, visitor numbers dropped only to a certain level and then stabilised, he adds.
Once the attraction’s refurbished it’ll be renamed Explorado, not least to alert the public to the fact there’s a new offer. In addition to the updating of the original exhibitions – structured around the elements of fire, water, earth and wind – this summer will see the launch of a Science of Soccer exhibition to tie in with the World Cup in Brazil. Visitor numbers for 2014 are estimated at 100,000.
Also on the cards this summer is another Explorado project, albeit under a different guise. From 19 June to 17 August, Blueprint will be working with the University of Münster, Germany to host an Explorado Adventure Campus: an open-air play and learning park close to the city’s schloss (palace). Staffed by university students, this mobile science centre serves a dual purpose – it takes advantage of the busiest 10 weeks of the year for science centres in Germany and also tests the potential for a permanent Explorado offering in the local market.
As the company continues to grow the Explorado brand, says Waschk, it will do so through a combination of these temporary exhibitions and permanent sites. Markets they’re currently exploring include Berlin, Hamburg and Munich, plus Poland, Hungary, Austria and the Netherlands – but wherever they end up, ‘edutainment’ will remain the key.
What they mean by this, says Waschk, can be perfectly summed up in one of the most popular exhibits at Odysseum: the astronaut’s toilet. “The European Space Agency is based in Cologne, and if you ask [those scientists about space travel], they’ll talk about the high-tech stuff. But if you ask ordinary people what they want to know, it’s things like how do astronauts comb their hair or use the toilet?”
To demonstrate this, the company’s installed an original astronaut’s training toilet in Odysseum – visitors sit to test their positioning while a camera inside takes a picture to show them how they’ve done. “You see people there, being a little shy, then someone tries it and everybody’s laughing and really getting the point of how it works,” says Waschk. “And that’s the core message in every planning discussion we have – we ask, will it be fun getting the point? It’s not only about learning; it’s about the fun of learning. That’s where we come in.”
