Mattel Inc. (Nasdaq: MAT), the 81-year-old company known for Barbie dolls, Hot Wheels and Fisher-Price toys, will provide branding for the planned water park at the Catalyst entertainment district in west Greeley, officials announced Thursday.
To be called the Mattel Wonder Indoor Waterpark, it will be developed in partnership with aquatic design firm Martin Aquatic and waterpark management firm American Resort Management, and in collaboration with developer I-dentity Group.
“I think the Mattel branding would elevate the revenues that would be already expected, and this is a win-win for Greeley,” said Greeley Mayor Dale Hall late Thursday. “They’re so well known and they’ve chosen Greeley to come and be a part of. We’re going to be a place on the map in the Mattel world, so I think people will be coming from all around just for that purpose.”
Added Melissa McDonald, the city’s mayor pro tem, “I’m excited that Barbie’s coming to Greeley.”
The Greeley water park will be one of four the group plans to build and open over the next two years; the others are to be located in Orlando, Florida; south of Chicago in Bradley, Illinois; and near Omaha in Bellevue, Nebraska.
“Each of these parks will have some unique elements,” said Rick Coleman, CEO of American Resort Management, “so we’re creating an environment where you want to visit each one of the Mattel Wonder parks if you’re a national traveler, and not someone who just wants to stay in the region.”
Coleman described the deal as “a licensing agreement with Mattel” involving that company’s familiar brands, which are its intellectual property.
“Mattel is allowing us to use their best IP to make this indoor water park stronger than it would have been without a brand,” Coleman said. “It’ll increase visitation, it’ll increase per capita spending, it’ll increase frequency of visitation. It’ll do all the things you want it to do to drive your top numbers. It makes it a more attractive project than if it was going to be an independent, non-branded water park.
“Mattel is lending the IP; we’re the ones bringing it to life and making the project much more dynamic and much more compelling.”
In designing the Catalyst water park, Coleman said, “we did our modeling and said, ‘Hey, this is what we think it’ll do with and without the brand.’ Then we went to Mattel and pitched them on Greeley and Cascadia and this specific development, and had a day-long conversation with them.
“We’re being very careful because there’s only going to be room in America for a few of these Mattel Wonders,” he said. “So we’re trying to make sure that we’re partnering with developments that have the same guest-centric focus experience that we do. We’ve always been impressed with everything that’s happening with this project. So Mattel came in for a site visit three or four weeks ago, and that was the last piece of the puzzle.”
To be owned and controlled by the city of Greeley, the Catalyst entertainment district at Weld County Road 17 and U.S. 34 would include the water park as well as a hotel and an ice arena that would house the Colorado Eagles minor-league hockey team, owned by Windsor-based developer Martin Lind, as well as ice sheets for youth hockey. It would anchor the Cascadia residential and commercial project that would surround it, being developed by Lind’s Water Valley Co.
“When you bring the best of any industry to Greeley, that’s a big deal,” Lind told BizWest.
“It is a testimony to the magnitude and significance of the Cascadia project that a world-renowned industry leader like Mattel recognizes this as a place that’s not only viable but can be part of a very elite pedigree we’re included in,” he said. “It’s a confirmation of how good this project is.”
Lind said Water Valley officials were “intimately involved” in the negotiations with Mattel, “and beyond excited to see if we could get it done. We had meetings with them down in Orlando a couple weeks ago.”
McDonald said “having the Eagles as an anchor tenant and with all the youth hockey tournaments we’re going to have, the water park will be something for families to do. Hockey families like to stay in one area and not tote their families all over from a hotel to an arena. It’s all right there.”
Headquartered in Grand Prairie, Texas, and Erie, Pennsylvania, American Resort Management is a full-service hospitality management and development consulting company that specializes in property management and development services in the water-park, attractions, hotel, and resort industries.
“We’re water park junkies,” Coleman said. “We’ve been doing water parks almost as long as they’ve been around. And we’ve always tried to find a way to bring more of those large-scale theme park experiences to life in these smaller intimate spaces.”
Catalyst, he said, “is exactly what we’ve been looking for for a long time, because now we can have the mini-parades throughout the day, everything you’d ever experience in California or Orlando, but we can do it in a smaller version on this campus.
“What really excites us about the (Catalyst) campus is that it’s not just the standalone hotel and water park sitting out in nowhere; it’s part of a major entertainment destination,” he said. “We’re already talking about all the different ways that what we’re doing in the water park can spill out across the campus and be used appropriately in making it an even better, more engaging experience and get more people to travel further distances to Greeley, Colorado, to see everything that we’ve unveiled.”
That’s why he’s not worried that the water park would be not along Interstate 25 but several miles east of it.
The entire metropolitan statistical area between Cheyenne and Colorado Springs, Coleman said, “is underserved for an attraction like this. It’s a destination with Mattel, it does not need to be highway located. People come to us. We’re going to help that specific area become hub-and-spoke tourism.”
Northern Colorado hasn’t had a water park since the 2005 closure of Crystal Rapids, which operated for 12 years near U.S. 34 and Boyd Lake Avenue in Loveland.
“We took the kids in the summer over to Crystal Rapids because it was closer than driving down to Water World in Denver,” McDonald said. “So this is already going to be a regional pull, but now that we have the Mattel branding, we can expand that nationally.”
Chris Schroeder, CEO of I-dentity Group, which works to elevate the value of brands in the hospitality, dining, sports, entertainment and active-lifestyle industries, predicted that the Mattel-branded water park would be “a large regional draw, and as we always say, all ships rise with a high tide.
“Hats off to the team in Greeley that’s putting this together,” he said. “They really are ensuring the success and maximizing the revenues that could come in off this project. This is really going to be an iconic legacy brand. It’s going to draw attention to the area.”
Martin Aquatic, whose global portfolio spans large-scale resorts such as Royal Caribbean’s Perfect Day at CocoCay in the Bahamas, Universal Orlando’s Volcano Bay and The Ritz-Carlton Naples, as well as cruise-ship waterparks, will lead the concept-to-engineering design of the aquatic experiences. American Resort Management will oversee sustainable day-to-day performance and guest-flow optimization. I-dentity Group will craft the guest journey through themed signage, spatial storytelling and immersive environment décor.
Mattel, Coleman said, “decided a few years ago that they thought their IP lent itself perfectly to live experiences. So it’s been a very thorough process for Mattel to find groups like ours who wanted to bring their IP to life.” Bringing the idea to fruition, he said, took “eight months behind closed doors.”
Coleman said the branded water park would be attractive to adults as well as their children.
“It’s the appropriate mixture of their best intellectual property that’s most popular for the kids growing up today,” he said, “but you and I grew up with Hot Wheels and Matchbox and Barbies. We’ve got IP that adults have had longer than their kids have had.
“We’re being careful that when you get in, there’s a journey from one ‘land’ to another,” he said. “We do know that there’ll be Barbie and Hot Wheels and Fisher-Price” included in the water park, he said. “We’re working through the nuances of what percentage of any one IP and where they go in there. We do know Barbie lends itself very well to the pool because of Barbie Malibu Beach House and the Ken FlowRider. We’re still waiting on final approvals for that.
“We are in the process of fitting in all the elements we want to fit in,” Coleman said. “If it would have to grow because of that, it would be by just a small percentage of 5,000 to 8,000 square feet.”
Similar to the company’s Epic Waters water park in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, Coleman said, “the water park at Catalyst will have a retractable roof that, depending on the weather, could “open up as little as 8 feet or as much as 50%.”
Prices for admission will be market-driven, he said.
“Most visitors will be doing the resort stay, where you get four tickets for the day you arrive and the day you leave,” Coleman said. “For day-pass visitation, it’s dynamic pricing. We want everybody to be able to come and experience this. We’re working on rate tables for that market.”
The idea is to keep it affordable, he said.
“The water park’s a lot more fun when there’s a lot of people in there every day,” he said. “In early September and right after Easter before school lets out, those are organically slower times, so we can run amazing specials because that’s where the tourism isn’t there so much. So the locals can have the park to themselves.
“It’s programming we’ve been doing around the country for many years, and we’ll just plug it in right there.”
McDonald noted that American Resort Management has discount pricing for local residents at its Epic Waters Indoor Waterpark in Grand Prairie, adding that “I’ve made it my mission to make sure we have local pricing for Greeley residents and Greeley kids. We need to keep the pricing local for those kids to be able to enjoy it.
“Wnen we start looking at some of the benefits and negotiations with the operator, that is going to be top of mind for me,” she said.
Coleman wouldn’t comment on what would happen to the plan if Greeley voters approve Ballot Measure 1A in a special election Feb. 24. If passed, that measure would repeal the Greeley City Council’s Sept. 16 vote to approve a planned unit development for more than 833 acres of the Cascadia project.
“That’s a gray area that I pray we don’t have to navigate,” Lind said. “We’re going to work to protect citizens of Greeley from this terrible referendum, because developments like these rely on timing, and passage of 1A could have a catastrophic impact on the timing.”
If the measure passes, Hall said, “it’s obviously a negative issue with the process, but 1A is all about zoning, not about the project. It kind of delays the process, but it doesn’t necessarily say it’s all finished.”
This article was first published by BizWest, an independent news organization, and is published under a license agreement. © 2026 BizWest Media LLC.
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