Drima: The Origin Story
Long before the Drima team was conceiving intricate stories and creating immersive events for the Bloomington community, clever narratives were still an important theme within our lives. A major reason for that was Kate’s love of being an older sister and wanting to keep her younger sister’s imaginations vibrant and alive. One of our family’s go-to make-believe games was spies (or “E3s” as we called it). For us younger kids, playing E3s meant spying on neighbors, keeping tabs on aunts and uncles, and running training drills. For Kate, that meant putting together detailed dossiers, mission briefs, and other materials that really brought our game to life. She was so creative and only around 13 or 14 years old.
On the days when she went through the effort to take E3s to the next level, we felt like it was what we had always been training for! We would flip through the files and actually move throughout our neighborhood with a real purpose. When she shared her imagination with us, it felt like our game had real meaning.
E3s slowly drifted away as we got older, but Kate continued to share her ideas with us in different ways. On my 19th birthday, Kate offered to throw me a birthday party. I gave her my guest list and she created a whole murder mystery dinner with a custom story, characters based on my real friends, and a themed menu. At the end of the night, I was on cloud 9. It made me crave immersive events for every following birthday.
On my 21st birthday, Kate created a Harry Potter themed event all about brewing different cocktails - I mean potions! My family worked together to turn our living room into the Hogwarts Great Hall, complete with house flags on our ceiling. Then for my 23rd birthday, Kate made a custom escape room based on my favorite movie, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., where we were spies from around the world working together to save American spy Napoleon Solo and prevent an international incident. My friends were incredibly impressed and kept saying to me, “she needs to do this for real! As a job!”
Out of her love for immersive events and her friends, Kate would create custom experiences for all of her friends birthdays. Holly and I were always her assistants on party days and would be blown away during “show time.” Kate dabbled with the idea of starting a business, titled Drima, but decided she had too much going on and couldn’t dedicate enough time to taking it off the ground.
Finally, in early 2022, Holly and I were talking and decided that we wanted to be in on it too. We all have different skill sets and, put together, we knew we could make the Drima vision come to life. So, here we are, approaching our second public event in Bloomington and looking back at how proud we are of Kate. She has always shared her immersive event knowledge with us so selflessly and we are so excited to be able to share it with the Bloomington community too.
