An inflatable summer business plan
Joe Marrama walks the walk, slides the slide, bounces the bounce
Barely visible on a cruise down busy Route 28 in West Yarmouth, screened at the town’s order with berm and plantings, a sign announces you’ve found the Cape Cod Inflatable Park beside the Cape Cod Family Resort with similar logo.
The name is a little off, because the park has evolved into a water scene more than inflatable monsters kids love to bounce on. And the Family Resort really is a motel, the old Town and Country refurbished.
But make no mistake:
This is one of the more successful 10-week businesses on Cape Cod, even if owner Joe Marrama prefers a very low profile – if you know what he looks like (and you won’t by perusing Facebook, other social media, or even this story), you might notice him parking cars in the lot that takes up a chunk of the site’s 11 acres. He’s the 53-year-old guy wearing a baseball cap who came from Leominster.
Those 11 acres aren’t counting three motels he’s bought on Route 28 (shuttered except for employee housing, soon to be demolished), plus two defunct restaurants (Wing’s and Salties) and an old Dunkin Donuts (all slated for demo, maybe parking, maybe more park, maybe expanded motel).
Starting to get the picture?
On a good day the park attracts 1800 people. A couple hundred stay at Joe’s hotel next door for $350 to $500 per room per night (which includes multiple passes to the park), so they walk over. Many more drive in, pay $10 to park, buy water park tickets for $45, inflatable park tickets for $30 (a combo for $60).
They also might rent one of 50 cabanas, from $150 to $400 a day. They buy grab-and-go sandwiches cafeteria style, or food truck fare, or order from waitresses at the cabanas. Grownups can head to a new pool bar for a cold one while the kids jump, splash and slide, “the only pool bar in Massachusetts,” he says.
That’s real income. Then again, there are real expenses. 200 summer employees help run the show, many here on J-1 student visas from overseas (only five year-round employees). Marrama figures he and his partner have close to $50 million invested, from real estate to equipment and machinery, rides, infrastructure, hotel renovations.
It all compresses into the classic Cape Cod season, “Memorial Day to Labor Day,” he says. “One year we tried to stay open the week after Labor Day. It was dead.”
Marrama built this business mini-empire from an unusual base: Flea markets.
He ran one in Mashpee that moved to Dennis in 2002 (he still runs one in the Florida keys). In Dennis he started bringing in “bounce houses” in 2010 for kids to careen in inflated spaces and “they took over the flea market. I knew it was a hit.”
By 2012 he was introducing water rides to Dennis as well as a new location in Yarmouth, where by 2013 he was all in, and expanding. He evolved into “water inflatables,” slides basically, because “I had done everything I could do with (conventional) inflatables,” and then came hard structures. Water was pumped in for the Lazy River, (chlorinated and recycled), a closed system. By 2022 a big wave pool, always in motion, no more than 36 inches deep, took center stage. Three pump houses keep everything moving.
For awhile he included attractions like a zip line that attracted teenagers, but insurance rates and interest levels trended him back to safer entertainment and a younger crowd; 3 to 12 years old is his sweet spot (with paying adult supervision of course). He expects new additions next year to be more challenging and figures “the teenagers will come back.”
Marrama has an instinctive sense of his market. When he started to push toward water, his gut told him he needed to truck in a lot of sand, simulate a beachy scene to get people to buy in. Seemed like he was right, though the sand was an expensive pain, gritting up machinery and chafing inflatables. After a few years he felt he has established enough to go with AstroTurf, figuring people wouldn’t mind the artificiality, and looks like he was right again.
Then there’s the question of weather -- whether an outdoor inflatable/water park can make it in a clime far from predictably sunny and hot, with such a short season. But again Marrama understood something important:
Greyer days, when the beach is not so enticing, are his best. And when it’s sunny, if people staying at his motel want to fight traffic and go elsewhere, that’s not the end of the world either.
He’s created an inflatable business model made for pumping up in a tourist haven — like the south side of the mid-Cape, Route 28.
(For another perspective on the Route 28 corridor/strip, take a look at Cape Cod's ground zero ribbon).
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