June 23, 2015
If sipping a cup of coffee while petting cute and cuddly kittens is your idea of the ‘purr-fect’ day, then you’re in luck.
Philadelphia’s first ‘cat café’ – a coffee-shop-meets-cat-adoption-center – is set to open this winter, the Philadelphia Business Journal reports.
Philadelphia entrepreneur Kristin Eissler recently announced her plans to open the cat café, to be called Kawaii Kitty Café, sometime around December.
She said she's currently working on securing a location, which she has narrowed down to either Old City, Fishtown, Fairmount or Northern Liberties, and has already struck a partnership with the Philadelphia Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), a no-kill animal shelter in the city.
PAWS will supply Eissler with about a dozen cats at a time to live at the café until they find their forever homes.
Due to health regulations, a glass wall will separate the cat and café sections of the business, but customers can opt to sit on the feline side or watch the animals play through the glass, Eissler told the PBJ.
While the business model for a cat café is clever, it isn’t novel: Cat cafés are plentiful in Asia, where they originated in the late 1990s, and recently have been popping up across the country, with the first opening in California last year, followed by others in nearby cities such as Washington D.C. and New York.
Read the full Philadelphia Business Journal article here.
