It’s been a very busy January here at The Cat Cafe. We’ve had a few events that we wanted to let you know about, and we’ve done a whole lot of adoptions. January 2016 is shaping up to be our best month for adoptions since we opened!

We started the year off with a very special adoption. Bailey Jo, a cat who is completely blind, was the first adoption we completed this year. We were very happy to have had her in here at The Cat Cafe and glad that a couple who has experience with a special needs cat was the one that adopted her.

Bailey Jo didn’t spend too much time with us, but she worked her way into everyone’s heart. Even though she was blind, she was fine with walking around the room, even when it was filled to capacity. And it didn’t take her very long to figure out the cat doors between the playpen and the retreat, which was a concern we had.

Since then, there have been 10 other adoptions and it’s only January 20th. We’re likely to celebrate our one year anniversary by completing the most adoptions of any month here at The Cat Cafe.

We also held our second Cats on Mats session, which is something that we’re going to do on a monthly basis. We are going to continue to limit attendance to 12, because there just isn’t enough room to accommodate any more people.

In addition to the Cats on Mats session that we’ll hold on the second Wednesday of each month, we are looking into holding one on Sunday evenings. That way, we can try to work with people’s schedules so they can make it here to The Cat Cafe to have cats silently judge their yoga poses.

We are also looking into a reservation system for a limited number of spaces during our peak hours. We want people to be able to visit The Cat Cafe without making reservations, but we also want to make sure people with a limited amount of time to spend with us are able to get in to interact with the cats.

Finally, we’re trying to work through a way to have evening hours once or twice a month. One of things we hear from a lot of customers is that they wish we’d open in the evening, and we’re working doing this.

As always, we’d love to hear from you if you have any questions or suggestions. Thank you for making the start to 2016 a great one and we look forward to seeing you again soon!

It’s been a busy year for us at The Cat Cafe. After many delays due to construction and build out challenges, we opened with our full hours and adoptable cats in January 2015. We received quite a bit of media attention, and the resulting traffic was more than we were ready for.

But we learned from those challenges, and we adapted to handle them. We quickly implemented a limit to the number of people who could enter the cat playpen, and we went from five cats to ten. Then we added a couple of more and went to 12 cats. For a while, due to space challenges at our partner, San Diego Humane Society, we added a couple more cats and went to 14.

We learned that the sweet spot for cats is around a dozen, because that means that customers will be able to see quite a few cats but those who want to take a break can retreat into the back.

But most importantly, The Cat Cafe sent 117 cats to good homes. Our first adoption, Butterball, was a cute little orange tabby who was very friendly and playful. The people who took Butterball home aren’t the only people who adopted him, as we adopted him as our avatar.

The 117th adoption took place on New Year’s Eve. We closed out the year by sending home a senior special needs cat, Pushy, to a family that fell in love with him. What is interesting about Pushy’s adoption is that this was the second family to fall in love with him. One family that was visiting The Cat Cafe on their vacation fell in love with Pushy as well, and they wrote a check to cover Pushy’s adoption fees!

All along, we continued to focus on serving good locally roasted coffee and espresso drinks to our customers, while improving the quality of the snacks we offered.

We’re very happy with what The Cat Cafe accomplished in 2015, and we look forward to even better things in 2016. Thank you for all of your support in this journey and let’s make it an even better one this year!