Slick City makes its move into central Indiana

The delighted screams of dozens of children came from a school bus in the parking lot as a lone adult voice tried to calm everybody down. Good luck with that.

From the bus, the kids were 20 feet from the entrance to Slick City Action Park, an indoor waterless slide park that opened in April at 4430 N. County Road 1000E in Brownsburg.

On the other side of the door on a recent Wednesday afternoon, there were more screams and laughter as children slid on Slick City’s 13 slides, played basketball on a bouncy air court and maneuvered along a trapeze and zip line.

Justin Westerman watched his 10-year-old son Connor whoosh down a 20-foot-tall yellow slide. Westerman and his family visited Slick City with friends while on vacation from their home in Tallahassee, Florida.

“We wanted an indoor activity where we could stay out of the heat today and something that you can enjoy,” Westerman said. “We do a lot of jumping places, so this is something different for him.”

Connor walked over to his dad with a smile on his face saying, “It’s fun! It’s fast!”

Marissa Lassaux, a Westfield resident who opened Brownsburg’s Slick City with her husband, John, said out-of-state families regularly visit while on vacation. People came from Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania shortly after the attraction opened, she said. Today, about 10,000 people visit each week.

Along with the slides and other play equipment in the 42,000-square-foot warehouse space, there is a full-service cafe that hosts birthday parties and serves pizza, hot dogs, chicken fingers and drinks. A “Junior Jungle” attraction is available for children ages 3 and under who are too young to ride the slides. Slick City also hosts events and promotions, such as corporate outings and an adults-only night.

Pricing is $26.99 per person for 90 minutes, $31.99 for two hours and $14.99 for children 3 and under. There is no charge for friends and family who just want to watch and not participate.

The St. Louis-based company founded in 2021 by family entertainment entrepreneurs Bron Launsby and Gary Schmit opened its first slide park in 2022 in Denver. Today, Slick City has 17 locations in 10 states. About 60 more slide parks are in the pipeline, including three in central Indiana.

The Lassauxes were out-of-town visitors themselves two years ago on a spring break trip in Colorado when they went to Slick City’s slide park in Denver with their two youngest children. The couple, who both have real estate backgrounds, returned home and started researching how to bring Slick City to Indiana.

“We told all of our friends, we showed all the videos, and we were like, ‘Man, we need to open one of these. How do we do that?’ And we just started emailing,” Marissa Lassaux said. “At the time, they weren’t even franchising, but we just kept on them, and it was something they were going to do but just hadn’t. They told us we weren’t the first to inquire but that we were definitely the most persistent.”

Expanding in Indiana

Today, the Lassauxes are franchisees in Brownsburg, and they are looking for a spot to open a Slick City location near Grand Park Sports Campus in Westfield. Marissa manages the day-to-day operations, while John oversees the finances.

“This, for us, was just something so completely different and exciting,” Marissa Lassaux said. “It was innovative. It was something we wanted to do and had as much fun as our kids, and so that’s why we thought it was different and wanted to get involved.”

A second local franchisee, Eddie Wilson, plans to open Slick City locations at the sites of two former Marsh Supermarkets stores—one at the Geist Center strip mall at 11625 Fox Road on the northeast side of Indianapolis and another at 2904 S. State Road 135 in Greenwood.

The Marsh stores at both locations closed in 2017 after the company declared bankruptcy. A Needler’s Market store took the place of the Marsh grocery at Geist Center, but it closed in 2019.

Geist Center is also home to a CVS pharmacy, Dollar Tree, Speck’s Pet Supplies, the Sushi House Japanese restaurant and the Happy Dragon Chinese restaurant. Goodwill of Central and Southern Indiana plans to open a retail store at Geist Center. The Greenwood location was a standalone grocery store.

Slick City’s Geist location will be 58,000 square feet, while the Greenwood slide park will be 54,000 square feet. Both will have approximately 17 slides, two air courts for basketball and dodgeball, arcade games and a climbing area.

Wilson works in commercial real estate and never previously considered franchising a business. But he is interested in indoor entertainment parks, such as Sky Zone Trampoline Park, Main Event and Urban Air Adventure Park, and a friend suggested he look into Slick City.

“You’re going to have kids all the time,” Wilson said. “There’s always going to be kids out there who want to come to the park. It’s a pretty simple model in my view.”

Alex Benepe, vice president of franchise and business development for Slick City, said the company currently focuses on finding locations in areas with at least 150,000 people. For franchisees, there is an initial $75,000 fee that is due on signing a 10-year franchise agreement.

Slick City plans to eventually move into smaller cities outside major metropolitan areas, such as Evansville, Fort Wayne and Schererville. To prepare, Benepe said the company is looking at how to retrofit its model into a 20,000-square-foot space.

“When you get down to those smaller sizes, it makes the initial investment much smaller and therefore, could make this model much more viable in smaller cities,” he said.

Fighting through competition

Slick City is the latest entrant into a growing local indoor entertainment scene in which venues like Sky Zone and Urban Air Adventure Park have opened in recent years in central Indiana.

Locally, Sky Zone has trampoline parks on the northeast and south sides of Indianapolis and in Plainfield, while Urban Air has adventure parks in Bloomington, Franklin, Noblesville and Plainfield.

According to a report conducted by Market Research Future, the global indoor entertainment center market size is expected to grow from $69.3 billion this year to $125.6 billion in 2034.

Benepe said indoor entertainment venues that are not newly constructed—as is the case with Slick City Brownsburg—often take the place of retail stores that have closed.

“We’re noticing that trend nationally that a lot of retail in malls and strip malls is switching to location-based entertainment or communal activities, which is an interesting side effect of so much retail moving online,” Benepe said. “They’re switching to local-based entertainment, and in turn, that helps the remaining retailers succeed because it brings foot traffic to the locations. So people come to play and they stay to shop.”

Slick City founders Launsby and Schmit both come from backgrounds in the family entertainment industry. Launsby focused on building trampoline parks and was Sky Zone’s largest franchisee with nine locations before he started focusing on Slick City full time. Schmit built the world’s tallest floating waterslide called H2-WHOA at Pleasant Harbor Waterpark in Lake Pleasant, Arizona.

“It was a very successful business for [Schmit],” Benepe said. “The downside was that it was extremely seasonal. This was a summer activity that would close in the winter months, and he began asking himself, ‘How could you take this business indoors where it could be open year-round?’ And to do that, you need to make the slides shorter, because you need to work with the clear heights of existing buildings, and you ideally want to do that without water.”

Benepe said Schmit began researching and testing different materials and worked with a tribologist (a scientist who studies friction and wear) to create a surface that would make Slick City’s slide as slippery as water slides. People who use the slides lie on their stomachs on top of a mat that sends them racing down to the bottom. Slick City has filed or been granted 63 patents to protect its intellectual property from competitors.

“Over many months, they tested a lot of different materials and narrowed down the kind of magical right mix of this special surfacing that’s applied to the slides during the construction process, along with a specific, unique blend of woven polymers that goes into the mats,” Benepe said.

Over the past couple years, Benepe said Slick City’s demographic has gotten older with more adults using the slides. About 26% of the company’s revenue in 2024 came from people ages 18 and up.

“We’re getting an older demographic that comes. That’s not to say that younger kids still aren’t our bread and butter,” he said. “I’ve seen little kids go down every single slide we have, and once they overcome their fear and go for it, they have an absolute blast.”•