Pedro Moore and Andre Brown of Bump N Play have a new corporate-retreat idea.
Think human wrecking balls.
The best friends want to marry corporate bonding and bubble soccer, a ridiculously funny sport that started as a joke in Norway and arrived in Delaware in mid-December.
Bubble soccer is exactly like regulation soccer, except the players’ torsos are enveloped in giant plastic bubbles. When they bump, they roll, with hilarious results.
Censors had to bleep the players’ comments when Jimmy Fallon faced off with Colin Farrell on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”
Delaware’s Bump N Play started small with 10 bubble suits, some kneepads, insurance and business license, and a can of disinfectant spray. Now the owners do birthday and bachelor parties at prices ranging from $220 to $250, but they’d like to expand to corporate events.
“I’m entrepreneurial at heart,” Moore said. “I came across this and I saw there was a void in the market.”
Entrepreneurial is an understatement. Moore was one of the original founders of the CoIN Loft, Wilmington’s popular co-working space. He and Brown joined the Business Professionals of America together when they were still at William Penn High School. Football practice prevented them from holding down after-school jobs, so they started one-man businesses to make spending money. Brown sold candy; Moore sold music.
Fast-forward to last year, when Brown went on a Christian retreat that offered bubble soccer: “It was such a fun experience,” he said. “All the men who gathered had so much fun playing it that I knew it would be a big hit.”
The entrepreneurs believe bubble soccer, or boblefotball, as the Norwegians dub it, could be the next corporate craze. “I’m kind of building that pipeline up,” Moore said.
“My thinking is, because there’s a lot of tension involved in corporations and people are always under pressure, this is an outlet to try to give the staff a break,” he said.
Moore said managers who sit back and watch employees taking to the court might observe something else. “You see how people act under pressure.”
Moore and Brown bring their business to the client, but they have rental venues for clients who don’t have their own.
“My vision is that we can grow in Delaware and also spill into Pennsylvania and Maryland,” Moore said. ♦
