Vivi Zayas did not set out to open a business. She was a nanny with no formal training in entrepreneurship. What she had was an idea from her native Paraguay, where play cafés were already part of everyday family life. In Ardmore, she saw what local parents were missing: a warm, inclusive place to sit down while their kids played. So in 2013, she opened Lulu’s Casita, the first indoor play café on the Main Line.

Vivi runs the business with her husband, Dario. Named after their first daughter Lulu, the casita has grown up alongside the family. Lulu still greets visitors as though the whole place belongs to her, and in a lot of ways, it does. Thirteen years later, the casita has raised a generation of Main Line kids. Some now come back as college students home for the holidays. 

Off the clock, she is a mom of two juggling middle school drop-offs at two schools with two start times. She has also steered the casita through a pandemic. When families couldn’t come to her, she brought Lulu’s to them with seasonal outdoor tours, at-home celebration kits, virtual character visits, and backyard parties. That same drive launched a fleet of parade-worthy party buses and kept a small business and its community connected.

Vivi Zayas is a 2026 Main Line Parent Women of Influence Award Winner

Main Line Parent’s Women of Influence Awards celebrate exceptional women making significant impacts in our community. Vivi was nominated by a longtime friend and fellow business owner and selected based on her achievements and dedication to creating positive change. Each Women of Influence Award Winner has committed to support Family Focus Media’s core values. Together, we are committed to fostering a sense of belonging and empowerment for all families. All backgrounds, races, genders, and sexual orientations are welcome and safe with us.

A Casita Built on a Feeling, Not a Formula

Ask Vivi why she opened Lulu’s Casita and she does not talk about market research. She talks about wanting somewhere everyone would feel at home. “My number one goal was to create a space that was safe for parents, caregivers, and their little ones to feel like they belong,” she said. “A place to celebrate different cultures and come together as a community.” 

She fell for Ardmore’s diversity before she ever signed a lease. Thirteen years in, that instinct has become the thing families measure their own history by. “If you lived in Ardmore or nearby and you haven’t had a Lulu’s party, it’s kind of like you’re missing out on childhood milestones,” she said. 

The kids who once toddled through her doors are now in high school, some heading off to college, and Vivi still remembers them all. “It’s really awesome just to see that change,” she said, “but that core feeling of belonging and community and family and gathering hasn’t changed.”

Pivoting Instead of Panicking

That instinct to adapt is exactly what carried Lulu’s Casita through 2020, when the in-person parties that paid the bills disappeared overnight. Vivi found herself rereading her own original business plan, looking for a spark to keep it going. And there she found it, something she had forgotten. 

“It was right there,” she said. “I totally forgot between having two kids back to back and managing the hustle of a new business. We needed a bus! That was it!”

Within five weeks, her father had tracked one down and Lulu’s on Wheels, the mobile play bus that now anchors a huge share of the business, was on the road. Later they debuted Ruby’s Glam Bus, a glammed up sister vehicle dreamed up by Vivi’s younger daughter, Ruby. “She’s my little business partner,” Vivi said, laughing. “She wanted something built for kids who had aged out of Lulu’s – hip, and not too much pink.” 

Today the buses serve everything from five-year-old princess parties to grown women’s Galentine’s nights. What’s more, Vivi has built an entire second business line around Lulu’s on Wheels visiting preschools in Ardmore, Bala Cynwyd, and Haddonfield, New Jersey. She admits these new partnerships with preschools have not even made it onto her website yet.

Knowing When to Let Go

Adapting also meant making a harder call. Lulu’s had a Westchester location for a time, and when the lease came up during a slow post-pandemic recovery, Vivi chose to close it rather than force it. “You kind of have to realize too, okay, it’s not worth it,” she said, “let me just put my energy into something else that I know was working.” 

Choosing peace of mind and family time over stretching herself across two locations is a version of leadership that does not always get celebrated the way growth does. Vivi is unsentimental about it. “My peace of mind is also important. My well being is also important. And my family is also important,” she said.

The Work That Has Nothing to Do With the Bottom Line

Vivi’s 2021 Publishers’ LOVE Award profile in Main Line Parent captured the early chapter of what became a much bigger story that year. During the vaccine rollout, Vivi struggled for weeks to get her father an appointment. She spent nights searching registration portals for other families, most of them Spanish-speaking immigrants navigating a system that was not built with them in mind.

CNN featured her effort at the time, describing a small business owner turning the same problem-solving instincts she used to run a play café toward helping strangers get access to care. During that same stretch, her costumed characters visited nursing homes and lower-income neighborhoods to bring some brightness to an isolating year. And her team kept delivering birthday-in-a-box kits to families who needed a lift.

Showing Up, No Matter What

No matter how busy the schedule gets, Vivi makes time to show up for kids who are having the hardest time. Vivi described a young girl, Emily, who came to Lulu’s Princess Camp while going through chemotherapy. When Emily’s mother reached out about wanting to mark her daughter’s last day of treatment, Vivi did not hesitate. “I was like, listen, you just cover whatever I paid the girls and my driver, we’re coming,” she said. 

One of her staff dressed as Elsa and Ruby’s Glam Bus showed up on a Wednesday for what Vivi calls, simply, “an IV cancer kind of party.” She still checks in. “We always donate to her lemonade stand,” she said. “She’s pretty amazing. She’s a warrior princess for sure.” 

Lulu’s also partners with CHOP for an annual fundraiser and shows up for events in Kensington and Philadelphia’s Latino community. It’s work that Vivi describes not as charity but as an extension of who she already is. “It just feels good to give back to the community,” she said.

That same steadiness showed up this past summer when someone spray-painted slurs across her party buses, the very ones she uses to bring joy to birthdays and community events. The buses were booked for a party in two days. Vivi and her father scrubbed them clean themselves, working late into the night before the job. “That was hard. Very traumatizing,” she said. “But we showed up, we made it work.” 

Her explanation for how she gets through moments like that has become something close to a personal motto. “You roll with the punches. You dust off the shoulders and smile and keep on going.”

Passing It Forward

Vivi is quick to credit the women around her, even when she is reluctant to take credit herself. Over the years she has made a habit of sitting down informally with other business owners who reach out, women navigating the same leap she once took from idea to storefront. She does not track it as a formal program or count it as part of the job. It is simply part of how she operates. “It takes a village,” she said, describing the mix of women who have shaped her own path and the ones she has tried to be present for in turn.

Asked what she wishes someone had told her when she was starting out, her answer was not about strategy or funding. “I wish people would said, ‘okay, are you ready for all that hard work, plus some more?’” she said. “But if you still have that passion in you and if you still see the value of what you’re doing, it’s all worth it. I would do it 10,000 times again.” That willingness to hand her own hard-won lessons to whoever asks, freely and without much fuss, is its own quiet form of mentorship.

A Life Built Around Slow Mornings

Outside of work, Vivi is the mother of two girls navigating two different schools and two different drop-off times this year, a schedule shift she is still adjusting to. Her ideal day off is not ambitious. “Still be in my PJs at 1 pm if I want to,” she said. “Making breakfast and just sitting, talking, and connecting with the girls. Maybe go do a quick workout, then come home, be here, be connected, with nowhere else to go — that is my ideal day.” 

Watching Lulu and Ruby grow up alongside the business has changed how she sees it. “It just makes it more real in a way, because it was part of my everyday life,” she said of the years she spent nursing one daughter while building the company. Both girls now help out at Princess Camp, and Vivi lights up describing one quiet Sunday when Lulu offered to help run a party herself. “I created something that she wants to be involved with and feel part of,” she said. “I feel like I just kind of made it in life.”

Ask Vivi what she wants people to remember and she does not mention growth or awards. “I want them to know that they can count on me,” she said. “That I’m going to make it work, and they can count on me if they need me to be there for them. I will put in the hard work.”

Follow Lulu’s Casita on Instagram and Facebook.

Help us honor Vivi by sharing what her work means to you in the comments below.