Today we’d like to introduce you to Cailey Dawson.
Cailey, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I came by my love of mysteries quite honestly, through my mom, Kathleen, or Kat. She is a die hard mystery fan: cozy mystery novels, classic 70s shows like Nancy Drew, Columbo, McMillan and Wife, mystery movies from the 20’s to today, Clue the boardgame and the movie, all manner of mystery novels, and of course, the Queen of the Mystery, Agatha Christie. Something else you should know about Kat is that she is a creative genius with the most incredible eye for detail. So all these superpowers combined with the power of being the greatest mom in the world to create one very inimitable person. It was only natural that she created my first Mystery Birthday Party when I was about 10 years old for me and my friends. It was complete with flower names for all our characters (which we have used now in one of our escape rooms), costumes, a decorated and immersive set (our apartment), a medium (my aunt wrapped in gauzy scarves), clues and puzzles hidden everywhere, and a MURDER that took place right in front of us! It had everything even a discerning adult mystery lover could have wanted for an immersive adventure and it was all just for 4 little girls in our pretty dresses with our magnifying glasses and notebooks.
From there, we were all hooked. Kat continued to throw mystery parties for me and later once word got around, for our friends as well, for Halloween parties and more. When I got older, I started creating them for my mom for her birthday! Fast forward to a few years post college graduation, I was working for a non-profit and transitioning from a temporary position into a permanent one. Before making the move, one day I just went to Kat and said what if we do our mystery parties… but for hire. We started working a side hustle of a small event planning company specializing in mystery events for about a minute. We quickly realized to scale the type of immersive, theatrical experiences that we wanted, we would really only ever be working for the 1%, and coming from nothing ourselves, that just wasn’t where our hearts were. Around the same time, we had started playing escape rooms for fun here and there- mysteries, puzzles, themed rooms, its like they were tailor made for us! We realized escape rooms were what we were doing with our mystery events but on a scale that we could have lots of people be able to experience them! We talked about it, our eyes gleaming with excitement and a little mischief. We ran some, to be honest very brief, numbers, and we just jumped. Kat’s life savings plus me working for nothing equaled putting our dream into reality! We’re still working on growing. We have 200 million fabulous ideas all at once that we can only execute a little at a time, but we’re doing it.
8 years later and we’re still here in our little corner of the world we get to make fair and fun and exciting and beautiful and meaningful. We have so many plans for the future but since we design, build, and execute almost everything from tech to carpentry to puzzle ideas ourselves in house, it definitely takes us a little while to get our projects from the design page to a living, breathing space our players, or seekers as we affectionately call our adventurers, can interact and connect with. We stay current with the bells and whistles but when it comes to design and ideation, we still meet, just Kat and me, for coffees at our local Barnes & Noble we’ve been going to since I was a little kid. This Barnes and Noble has seen us through every phase of life: reading children’s books, checking off summer reading lists, college applications, planning opening Black Cat Escapes back when it was just an idea, wedding planning, Kat’s retirement from her day job, vacations, and every new creative project. If you go by often enough, you’ll see us there eventually in our natural habitat, lattes (pumpkin when the season allows of course) in hand, cute little notebooks open in front of us, and us just talking, building our ideas up back and forth together. There is no workspace app or creative flow web site that can equal our little lined notebooks, pens, and our creative minds pinging back and forth.
And that’s the story of us. A thousand steps covered, 8 billion more to go! We’re working at it every day, continuing to grow and build new experiences while making memories for our seekers in our current themes and hopefully providing a little mystery, a little magic and a touch of mischief to all who visit us at Black Cat Escapes.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Cash flow haha! When you come from nothing and you try to start a whole business, it can feel like you’re always robbing Peter to pay Paul. We do a lot ourselves and that saves us some money but it also means it takes us longer to open experiences, so we always feel behind. Our life’s savings as well as our dreams and hopes are all out on the line here but its been worth it every step of the way.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
We specialize in character driven, heavier mystery storylines where you aren’t just finding an artefact but you’re finding out why that artefact was cursed in the first place and what the guy who cursed it was going through haha. We love a good mystery so for the mystery lovers, we always like to include little hints at the mystery along the way so you’re not just “escaping” something, you’re actually getting to live in and solve a mystery.
History is also a huge focus for us. Kat is a history major which flows right into my love of storytelling being an English major myself. All of our rooms take place in a different time as well as place. It adds an extra challenge for us because not only do we want to find period specific props, set pieces, etc. but also if we want tech in our rooms, we can’t really just show it. If you have a modern CIA Command Center, a screen can just be a screen, an electric locked door can be exactly what it is and you just have to find the code, etc. Our tech has to be “magic” or “spirits” or “physical mechanisms” that someone made. So a screen can’t be a screen, it has to be a mirror getting messages from the other side or a 1920’s Call Operator’s Visual Aid Screen, for example. It adds an extra challenge but we kind of love it because it forces us to be more creative.
Finally, we really love design, antiquing, and beautiful spaces so we really like to choose themes that you don’t necessarily WANT to escape from. Originally, escape rooms were a lot of places you don’t want to be: prison, detention, serial killer’s cabin, etc. Therefore you want to escape as fast as possible haha. We like to turn that on its head and make detailed, beautiful, immersive sets where you truly feel like you’ve stepped into a different time, a different world, and you aren’t necessarily eager to leave it just yet.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
Hard to tell but we can’t wait to see where things go! This industry is so phenomenal not only because of how new it is but because truly the sky’s the limit. We definitely predict an increase in actors in games, bigger and better sets, bigger and better tech, the usual innovations when people start trying to outdo their last project. There are also a lot of arcade style escape rooms popping up- you go into a smaller single room game with 1 goal and once you solve it in 5 minutes or so, you come out and can try a different one. They’re much less about story, immersion, mystery, and to be honest, from what we’ve heard from some of the bigger owners of these, seem to be more about pushing more players through in a shorter amount of time to make more money. And there’s honestly nothing wrong with that! We’ve played a few like this and had a great time! We just don’t fall in line with some people’s view that its the only way to make money, that its the only way to have a future in this industry. The same way short form content can be fun, people still want movies. You can go to an arcade and play some games sometimes but you still might want to play a longer, story-driven video game. The world is big enough for both and giving people options is almost never a bad thing! So I think we’ll see more of those short form, arcade style escapes pop up, but I do still think there will always be a place for the longer, more immersive experiences too. Chains are also becoming increasingly popular where they kind of have a template for rooms and then individual franchises or chain locations get the games almost in boxes and can install them, in a kind of modular way. I’ve definitely played some of those and had a great time, a couple are in my top games list! But of course, I do think you can feel the difference when you get just a person or a team that created a game they believed in and poured their creativity and whimsy into. We’re excited for the future, to see the creativity and be wowed as we always are by makers and artists across the world, and as players we can’t wait for more wild and memorable moments in escape rooms, they’re our favorite hobby besides being our jobs haha!
Pricing:
- $30-$46 per person depending on size of group
Contact Info:
- Website: https://blackcatescaperoomva.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blackcatescaperoom
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BlackCatEscapeRoom
