Felicity Jacobs and Claire Middleton of Petite Street Play Village: How to Turn a Venue Into Somewhere Families Want to Return To

Running a venue-based children’s business comes with a completely different kind of pressure.

You can have a beautiful space, a brilliant concept and a service families genuinely love, but none of that removes the need to keep getting people through the door.

Rent, utilities, maintenance, staffing and constant upkeep don’t disappear just because the venue looks lovely on Instagram, so the commercial side of the business has to work just as hard as the customer experience.

That’s why my conversation with Felicity Jacobs and Claire Middleton from Petite Street Play Village was so interesting. Petite Street is a purpose-built indoor role-play village in South Leicestershire where children can explore miniature real-life environments through imaginative, child-led play.

Felicity and Claire, both former childminders, launched the business after recognising how valuable role play is for children and how few dedicated spaces existed locally.

Four years later, they’ve built much more than a venue. They’ve created a place families return to for play sessions, parties, story experiences and special events, while continually learning what gets people through the door and what keeps them coming back.

Felicity and Claire are finalists for Children’s Activity Provider of the Year, sponsored by Thrive4Activities, at The Class Business Awards 2026.

The dream started with a very empty building

Before Petite Street existed, Felicity and Claire were both childminders. They became friends through their businesses and quickly realised they shared a passion for imaginative play, having seen first-hand how much children learn through pretending, exploring and copying the world around them.

As they explained:

“We both spent years working with children and we were both passionate about imaginative play.”

At the time, they felt most local provision centred around soft play rather than role play, so there was a genuine gap in the market.

The practical side of turning that idea into a business was far less straightforward. It took around a year to find a suitable venue, and even when they did, the building was essentially an empty shell. There was no proper heating, poor electrics, no flooring, the roof needed replacing and the whole space required a complete transformation.

Felicity and Claire funded the project personally and brought in tradespeople to help realise the vision. That kind of work is easy to overlook once customers only see the finished space, but it’s a useful reminder that venue businesses often carry a huge amount of risk before the first customer ever walks through the door.

Design the space around how children actually play

Petite Street now has eight different role-play areas, including a vets, supermarket, salon, café, medical area, builders’ yard and a seasonal space.

One of the most interesting parts of their story is that they haven’t treated those areas as fixed forever. The venue originally had a post office, and while the concept made sense on paper, Felicity and Claire noticed that children simply weren’t using it in the way they had hoped.

They said:

“We just noticed that children weren’t playing in there.”

Rather than stubbornly keeping it because it had been part of the original plan, they changed the space into a nursery, and the response has been completely different.

That is such a useful lesson for any venue or class provider. You can be emotionally attached to an idea because it looked brilliant when you designed it, but customer behaviour is usually more useful than your attachment to the concept. If one area isn’t being used and another is constantly busy, there is valuable information in that.

The strongest businesses keep watching what people actually do and are willing to adapt around real behaviour.

Opening the doors is not the marketing strategy

One of the biggest lessons Felicity and Claire have learned over the last four years is how much marketing a venue actually requires.

They were refreshingly honest about being naive in the beginning.

As they put it:

“We probably just thought we’d open and then people would come and we wouldn’t have to do much.”

The reality has been very different.

Marketing is constant, and different channels work for different offers. Felicity and Claire have had to keep promoting the venue, testing what works and resisting the assumption that people automatically know they exist just because the business has been there for a few years.

They also made another really important point: their customers have become some of their strongest marketers.

Parents recommend Petite Street to other families, grandparents bring children after hearing about it, and aunts and uncles visit because the child has already been before with somebody else. That kind of word of mouth is incredibly valuable because it comes with trust already attached.

The customer experience creates the repeat visit

Petite Street runs 90-minute sessions, up to three times a day, across the week.

The sessions are designed around child-led play, but the experience isn’t only about the children. Parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles join in too, and Felicity and Claire talked about how much families value the calm nature of the venue compared with more chaotic play environments. They also regularly hear feedback about improvements in children’s social skills, speech and language.

There’s something else important happening too. The adults aren’t just sitting on the side waiting for the session to finish. They’re entering the café, helping in the supermarket and joining the pretend play.

That shared experience becomes part of the product, and for a venue business that matters because repeat visits are rarely driven by the physical space alone. They come from how the whole family felt while they were there.

Events can bring new people into your world

One of the cleverest parts of Petite Street’s model is the way Felicity and Claire use events.

Alongside regular sessions and parties, they run monthly interactive story sessions and character experiences, including princesses, Peppa Pig and other themed visits.

These aren’t just fun extras. They are also powerful customer acquisition tools.

A family may first visit because their child wants to see Elsa, Lightning McQueen or another favourite character. Once they are inside the venue, they discover everything else Petite Street has to offer, and that gives the core business the chance to do the rest.

One Lightning McQueen event sold out two sessions in around two hours.

That tells you something important about demand. You don’t always need to reinvent your entire business to create a fresh reason for people to engage with it. Sometimes you need one strong attraction offer that introduces a new customer to what you already do well.

For venue owners, that might mean character visits, seasonal events, themed sessions, workshops, storytelling, collaborations or one-off family experiences. The event gets the attention, but the core experience is what determines whether people return.

Don’t underestimate birthday parties

Parties are another increasingly important part of Petite Street’s revenue mix.

For their fourth birthday, Felicity and Claire ran their biggest Instagram giveaway yet, with a party as the prize.

That wasn’t random. They want more families to understand that parties are part of the offer, particularly as they move into the busier winter period.

There’s a broader commercial point here for anyone running a fixed venue. The overheads exist whether the space is full or empty, so the question becomes how many different customer needs the venue can serve without diluting the core experience.

For Petite Street, that means regular play sessions, parties, special events, story sessions and seasonal experiences. Each one gives the space another way to earn while still staying rooted in the same overall proposition.

Learn the natural customer cycle

After four years, Felicity and Claire are starting to understand the rhythm of the business much more clearly.

Children often begin visiting at around 18 months and then gradually move away from the venue as preschool and school become a bigger part of their lives.

That creates a natural customer lifecycle, and Felicity and Claire now feel they can begin to “rinse and repeat” some of what has worked across a 12-month cycle because they know there will always be new families entering that age bracket.

That doesn’t mean becoming stale. It means understanding which parts of the business can be repeated efficiently while leaving enough room to introduce something fresh.

For venue businesses, that shift is huge. The first few years are often about testing and observing. Which events work? When are the busiest months? What changes in summer? What happens in winter? When do parties spike? Which promotions actually convert?

Once you understand those patterns, planning becomes far less reactive and much more strategic.

Innovation doesn’t always mean starting again

One of the things I really like about Felicity and Claire is that they keep coming up with new ideas, but those ideas usually build on the business they already have.

They’re not changing direction every month. They’re keeping the core offer consistent while creating fresh reasons for people to revisit it.

A new character event, a seasonal play area, a different story session or a Halloween experience can refresh the customer experience without forcing them to rebuild the entire model.

That balance between consistency and freshness is especially important for venues. People want to know what they’re coming back to, but they also want a reason to come back again.

The venue is only part of the business

Petite Street is a lovely reminder that a physical venue can be a brilliant asset, but the building itself isn’t the business.

The business is everything around it: the marketing, the customer experience, the events, the repeat visits, the partnerships, the decision to replace something that isn’t working, the understanding of seasonal patterns and the ability to create new reasons to visit without losing the original purpose.

Felicity and Claire have spent four years learning those lessons in real time, and that experience is what now gives the business its strongest foundation.

Watch the full interview

In our full conversation, Felicity and Claire share how they transformed an empty venue into Petite Street Play Village, what they’ve learned about attracting customers, why special events have become such a valuable part of the business and how they’re now using four years of customer behaviour to plan more confidently for the future.

👉 Watch Felicity Jacobs and Claire Middleton’s full finalist interview here.

Felicity and Claire are finalists for Children’s Activity Provider of the Year, sponsored by Thrive4Activities, at The Class Business Awards 2026.

And if you run a venue, classes, clubs or activities and you want to have more conversations about what really drives customer acquisition, repeat visits, marketing and sustainable growth, join us at The Class Business Live on Saturday 10 October 2026 at the National Conference Centre in Solihull.

If you spend most of your working week solving problems inside your own four walls, come and spend a day in a room full of people who understand those problems too. Book your ticket for The Class Business Live and Awards here.