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!