Tricks of the eye, oddball perspectives and brain busters make up the Instagram-worthy exhibits at Museum of Illusions. Born in Croatia, the franchise is pushing into the United States, including in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.
You can take a photo of your head on a platter at the Museum of Illusions in Chicago. Or look like a tiny child sitting on a chair while your giant-sized companion pats your head. Or walk on the ceiling.
Those are just three of the exhibits at the new franchise now expanding in the United States. Started in 2015 by Roko Živkovi and Tomislav Pamukovi, two friends in Zagreb, Croatia, the Museum of Illusions has spread to 36 locations in more than 22 countries around the world, including Paris, Dubai, Toronto, Muscat, Kuala Lumpur, Berlin and Vienna.
The pair “curated” optical illusions familiar to many—from “true mirrors” that reflect how others see you to “portrait eyes” that follow your path to “vortex tunnels” that spin around a stationary walkway while you try not to fall off. Jason Mitchell, the franchisee in Chicago, calls the exhibits “simple” and “analog,” not to mention immersive and nostalgic for some.
“The Croatians are interesting guys. You’ll see these in other places,” he said about the exhibits, but nobody had the ingenuity to say, “let’s put this all together.” On a weekday afternoon in June, a steady stream of couples, families and groups of friends paid $21 each while they snapped photos, played with the brain teasers and wooden-block games and giggled when their single heads multiplied to hundreds in the kaleidoscope.
Mitchell was a manager for about a dozen years at a large go-kart family entertainment company. His friend from when they were 6 years old, Rob Cooper, has a brother who lives in Zagreb and visited the Museum of Illusions. “He’s in venture capital. He tracked down the owners and said, you should franchise it,” Mitchell said.
A visit to the one U.S. location sold them. “We went to New York and thought, oh, this could be a lot of fun,” Mitchell said. “We decided to start calling our friends for money.” On his 40th birthday, Mitchell decided to quit his job and the two friends raised about $800,000 from a half-dozen investors, to form LOL Entertainment.
It wasn’t enough. “We didn’t realize the U.S. prices,” he said, for real estate, construction and union labor. “We went back and got more,” and opened in Chicago in November 2020 and Philadelphia in March 2022. They signed a lease for Scottsdale, Arizona, in June and are looking in Boston for their fourth site. Cost of investment for Museum of Illusions ranges from $750,000 to $2.5 million.
Jonathan Benjamin is the newly appointed CEO of Metamorphosis, the parent company of Museum of Illusions. Formerly with Altitude Trampoline Parks as well as Wyndham, Hyatt and Tony Roma’s, he was hired after the founders sold a majority stake to a private equity group last summer, Invera Equity Partners based in Zagreb.
“They decided to put in a professional team whose whole focus would be on the next steps on maturing the company, putting professional level experts in there who understand what franchising entails,” Benjamin said. “We took a couple of months to assemble what I believe is one of the best teams that one can field.” The corporate staff grew from five to 25 employees in six months.
Benjamin is looking for U.S. headquarters space in Atlanta, and plans to open corporate-owned museums in Charlotte, North Carolina and Atlanta. The Atlanta operation, with a lease newly signed for 11,000 square feet in the Atlantic Station area, has a research and development lab to create new exhibits, which are in many cases made by artisans around the world.
“It’s a broad demographic that loves this. It’s very hands on, it’s Instagrammable, it’s TikTok-ish. People go there on dates,” Benjamin said. “It’s a little mind-boggling but fun.”
Mitchell added one more reason he believes the concept will have staying power. “I have two little daughters and it’s hard to find something to be enjoyed” by people of all ages. “They want to go to American Girl and I say, ‘Ugh, not again.’”
Who doesn’t want a photo of their head on a platter?