Hannah Duraid, director of The Great Escape Game, explains why the business should win the Startup of the Year category of the Guardian Small Business Showcase competition:
We discovered live escape room games while travelling. Upon returning to the UK in September 2014, so I could start my PGCE, we decided to start Sheffield’s first live escape room and the doors of our first room, Mad Scientist, opened in January 2015. Over the past 12 months we have opened three more rooms.
The Great Escape Game is Sheffield’s first and biggest live escape room experience, blurring the lines between the hum-drum of everyday life and the world of video games and movies. Friends, family or work colleagues are locked in a room with only 45 minutes to escape. As a team, they have to search high and low, far and wide as they ferret around trying to solve a series of intricate puzzles. Could you escape? We have seen thousands of people come through our doors, many returning to take on every room, totaling more than 17,000 bookings this year. Customers get a real buzz from their experience with us and we are currently voted number one on TripAdvisor.
In our opening month (January 2015) we had 57 bookings and by October we had more than 3,000. This is down to our sheer dedication to customer service and our focus on marketing. Our successful guerrilla marketing campaigns featuring bio-degradable spray painted corpse stencils around the city and disembodied hands sticking out of drains, which all unquestionably got Sheffield talking. We have employed 15 members of staff this year and are now looking for new premises so we can expand further.
All entries which meet the competition criteria are published and our judging panel select a shortlist of the top three for each category. Winners are announced at an awards ceremony in summer 2016.
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