The Factory’s own website poses the question better than any reporter could:
What do you do when you are tired of driving from place to place for soccer practice, for music lessons, to pick up a birthday gift, and to grab a bite to eat?
If you have children in Wake Forest, you know that Saturday. Practice at 9. Lesson at 10:30 on the other side of town. Somebody needs a present for a party at 2. Nobody has eaten. You have burned forty minutes of your life in the car and it is not yet lunch.
The Factory exists because someone looked at that problem and decided a building could solve it.
What it is
An old factory on South Main Street, meticulously renovated into a sports and entertainment mall. The address is 1839 South Main, and the building is big enough to have four main entrances labeled by compass direction. Doors are open daily 8 a.m. to 11 p.m., though individual businesses inside keep their own hours.
The tenant list is the point:
Ice. Polar Ice Wake Forest runs two NHL-regulation sheets inside the building, with public skate, Learn to Skate, figure skating, youth and adult hockey, and year-round camps.
Indoor field sports. House of Sports and MVP Sports Factory operate two soccer fields and two basketball courts, with programming in soccer, basketball, baseball, tennis, and lacrosse. Classes run in eight-week blocks for ages from 18 months up through 13. When the courts and fields are open, anyone can drop in for a flat fee, which buys up to an hour on the field or up to two hours on the courts.
Basketball training. Fireball Basketball Academy runs age-graded programs.
Everything else. Martial arts. Gymnastics. Axe throwing. Battle House Laser Tag. An arcade. A game store. Retail shops. Spas. Go-karts outside.
Food. Gonza Tacos y Tequila. Slices & Ices for New York-style pizza and Italian ice. Ziggy’s for pizza and paninis. Las Palmas and The Village Deli sit as separate buildings in the complex.
There is a lounge that looks out over the ice rink, which is the single most underrated feature in the place. You can watch your kid’s skating lesson with a coffee instead of standing in the cold.
The math that makes it work
Say you have two children with different interests. One skates, one plays soccer. Traditionally that is two facilities, two drives, two waiting periods, and a hard conversation about whose activity gets dropped.
At The Factory it is one parking lot. Drop one at the rink, walk the other to the indoor field, and go sit in the lounge. Afterward everybody eats in the same building. If there is a birthday party to shop for, the retail shops are twenty steps away.
This is why the complex gets described as a destination rather than a strip mall. It is not that any single tenant is extraordinary. It is that the combination eliminates the driving, and the driving was the thing making Saturday unbearable.
Kidvoyage’s practical guidance is to plan two to three hours and go on a weekday late afternoon if you want it quieter. Saturdays are the busy version, which is also the version the building was designed for.
The building deserves its own paragraph
Wake Forest has a real habit of this. The Cotton Company is a repurposed cotton warehouse. White Street Brewing is a 1930s car dealership. The Loading Dock is a converted warehouse. The Factory is another entry in the same tradition: an industrial building that could have been torn down for a parking lot and instead got a second life.
Out front there is a fountain with a sculpture in it. In warm weather you will find people tossing pennies in and kids running around it playing tag, which is not a thing anyone planned but is exactly the sort of thing that happens when you give a suburb somewhere to stand around outside.
Community use, not just commercial
The Factory functions as a venue as much as a business. The town’s police department has hosted a Touch-A-Truck Special Olympics fundraiser there. Seasonal events, festivals, and fundraisers run through the calendar.
That matters for a building this size. A shopping center is a place you go to buy things. A community building is a place things happen, and The Factory has drifted toward the second category through sheer accumulation of tenants who all want a reason to draw people in.
Who it is actually for
Parents of children roughly ages 3 through 16, primarily. That is the honest answer and The Factory does not pretend otherwise.
But the range is wider than it first appears. Adult hockey leagues run late. Axe throwing and laser tag are not children’s activities in any meaningful sense. The restaurants stand on their own. And for anybody in Wake Forest on a rainy Saturday with a house full of restless kids, the calculation is straightforward: one building, one drive, several hours accounted for.
Wake Forest grew from 47,601 residents at the 2020 census to a Census Bureau estimate of 54,337 by 2023, and a large share of that growth is families with young children. A town filling up that fast needs somewhere for all those Saturdays to go.
An old factory on South Main turned out to be the answer.
The Factory, 1839 South Main Street, Wake Forest. eatshopplay.com