When media veteran and entrepreneur Karen Robinovitz was going through a particularly dark time in her life, she found joy in a surprising source: slime. She was introduced to the gooey substance by way of her longtime friend, author Melissa de la Cruz. “When Melissa came by one day with her then 10-year-old, I hung out with her daughter who had slime,” Robinovitz said. “I realized that playing with slime brought me back my joy.” The malleable plaything became the driver of Robinovitz’s personal healing journey and reignited her creativity. It’s an experience she shared with friend and fellow entrepreneur Sara Schiller, who was similarly experiencing a difficult period. “That lent itself to the brand mission of slime and a world of delivering joy, because that’s sort of how I got myself back to life,” Robinovitz said.
In 2018, Robinovitz and Sloomoo co-founder Schiller developed a business plan, and in 2019 they opened the doors to the first Sloomoo Institute—a mecca of slime-centered interactive experiences—in Manhattan, which drew 30,000 visitors in its first month. She explained that Sloomoo is derived from a social media trend of replacing the vowels in names and words with “oo.” As Sloomoo Institute mushroomed to seven locations around the country, Robinovitz said that she and Schiller were brainstorming ideas for what their brand’s “fictional mythology” would be. “It made perfect sense that I would go to Melissa to write the story when she was actually a part of the real origin of the brand Sloomoo, so she could create the world of Sloomoo and the species,” Robinovitz noted.
De la Cruz, with her husband and co-author Mike Johnston, was happy to come aboard. “We visited Sloomoo Institute when it first opened and I told Karen, ‘This is amazing! You’re like the new Walt Disney,’ de la Cruz recalled. “Karen said, ‘Speaking of that, we want to start a media arm,’ and she asked me to partner with her.” De la Cruz understood the assignment and had traveled similar territory while writing the bestselling Descendants book series inspired by the Disney Channel movie franchise. As a key feature, she knew she wanted the book to have “parallels to Robinovitz and Schiller’s real story. We wanted to bring that aspect of darkness into light and finding joy and sorrow to it.”
Robinovitz’s one stipulation for the project was that it couldn’t be dependent on the brand, she said. “It has to be a standalone story. You never have to know that Sloomoo is a real-world thing. The joy is that if you love this and you come to the real-world one, you can be like, ‘This is just like the book.’
Putting it on the Page
In the inaugural title, Sloomoo: Making Friends, which pubs March 24, de la Cruz introduces Daisy, a science minded kid who’s really interested in slime. “I think readers will relate to her because she’s a little shy at school, and she doesn’t have a lot of friends there, but she has a vibrant online life where she has a slime channel and all these cool scientist friends. It’s about figuring out who you are and how to make friends.” With friendship as a foundation, the story moves into Daisy’s creation of her own Sloomoo, “which is what we call the sentient life forms,” de la Cruz said. “It’s a fun, fast read and I think it will hook a lot of reluctant readers. I really wanted it to be playful as well as entertaining.”
Robinovitz and Schiller are pleased with how it turned out. “Melissa and Mike wrote an origin story that has a lot of slimy adventure woven together with social-emotional learning, and lessons of resilience, acceptance, and inclusion, which was all part of our own personal journeys,” she said. “They nailed it.”
The close collaboration with Caballo Loco Studio to develop the illustrations went smoothly, too. “They understood our direction and our vision of what we wanted Sloomoo to look and feel like without it being so precious,” she said. From start to finish, creating Making Friends was roughly a two-year process, Robinovitz said.
Sloomoo Ink books are being published in partnership with bilingual edtech and entertainment company Encantos, which has a distribution agreement with Macmillan. De la Cruz and Johnston have mapped out four books so far and Robinovitz said that she and the Sloomoo Ink team are exploring other book formats as well as animation ideas with the thought, “How could this world become really inclusive and expansive in different ways?”
Making Friends debuts at a book signing on March 28 at Sloomoo Institute Los Angeles, and events at other locations are planned. Robinovitz said that indie and chain bookstores, and a partnership with podcaster Zibby Owens, are also part of the publicity and marketing mix.
