I know two of the happiest cats on the planet! Can you imagine Chess and Checker’s joy of being rescued, from a shelter, by Tanya, the founder of Feline Fortune Cookies, whose only ingredient is catnip! (
www.practicaldesign.ca)
Sixteen years ago, Tanya had a small home dog product and baby bib company. Her young son, Taylor, was allowed to play with the bib’s round neck scraps on the sewing machine.
At the age of four, he folded one of the rounds in his hand, held it up, and said, “Look Mom! I made a mouse! We should make catnip mice!”
“It was an ingenious idea,” said Tanya, “so we ran with it. Taylor sat on my lap, placed the circle in a bowl, folded in the catnip, we sewed them closed together, and finished by putting ears on the mice. We created a small business for Taylor and put the profits in a trust fund for his education. He was a natural entrepreneur, who learned about cost, business, selling, and banking. He even suggested ways to save money on production, which would create bigger profits. Today, Taylor is 20
years old and at college studying business, economics, and finance.”
Over the years, their catnip mice morphed into catnip fortune cookies and Tanya spent sleepless nights trying to think of funny feline fortunes. A few she came up with are:
The time for play is now.
Don’t meow over spilt milk.
Let your inner cat out of the bag.
A nap is in your future.
Their business was a success, allowing Tanya, a single mother, the flexibility to attend Taylor’s sports events. Then reps discovered their product at gift shows and have distributed them in Germany, Holland, Brazil, Japan, Europe, United Emirates, and Canada.
“Our cats, Chess and Checker, are our product and quality control testers,” laughs Tanya. “The catnip arrives double-bagged, 20 pounds at a time, in boxes. The cats go crazy rubbing and pawing the boxes before falling asleep on top of them. Right away, we know that the organic herb is a ‘high’ quality, because cats don’t respond to stale catnip. We have to store it in Rubbermaid bins to maintain its freshness and keep our cats from being purr-pet-chew-u-ally high.”
Initially, nervous about ordering 35,000 little fortune cookie boxes, Tanya did a test run of her products at an 11 day trade show. She put three fortune cookies in each of the trail boxes, and made enough to last her the entire show, but she sold out in two days! As a side note: during our interview, Checker was busy on the floor “killing” a fortune cookie.
Chess, six-years-old, and Checker, five-years-old, are inseparable, even though they were adopted from different shelters, and are different ages. Chess was sold as a female, but when the vet “looked under the hood” it was revealed that she was a “he” and there was no way Tanya would return the gentle kitty to a shelter.
The funny thing about the kitties is that Tanya adopted Chess as her buddy, and Taylor adopted Checker as his, but cats being cats had different plans. Pets choose their owners. Checker is now inseparable from Tanya, and Chess is Taylor’s best bud.
Cats are and have been a big part of Tanya and Taylor’s lives, and we can see they will be in the future, too.
