Nine weeks after it opened, Australia’s first cat café is going strong. The love for cats is growing and it looks like we may be seeing more cat cafes open soon.
Husband and wife team, Anita and Myles Loughran, had their first cat café experience when they visited Japan on their honeymoon. After returning to Australia, they decided to leave their jobs at a call center to start a business that they both wanted to work in. The result was Cat Cafe Melbourne, on the corner of Franklin and Queens streets.
Mr Loughran jokingly suggested opening a cat café in passing but his wife took the idea seriously.
“I kept think about it. Why isn’t there one in Australia when they’re all around the world? They’re spreading throughout Europe,” Ms Loughran said.
It took the Loughrans almost a year to go from idea to opening.
But the reception has made it all worth it. “It’s been fantastic. We’ve been almost fully booked the whole time, especially over the holidays and when we first opened as well so it’s doing really well. Cat lovers are loving it,” Ms Loughran said.
Visitors to the Cat Cafe Melbourne have been quite different to what the owners expected.
Ms Loughran said people in their 20s and social workers were not the only ones interested in playing with the cats, “It’s been right from the eight-year-olds we that we allow in right up to grandmothers and great-grandmothers.
“We see tourists, we see students who can’t have their own animals, international students. And then we just get a lot of middle-aged people who work in the city centre and they just want something relaxing to do, you know, especially if they work long hours,” she said.
When the cat café first opened, Ms Loughran hoped to abolish the booking-in-advance rule. However, she the system had to remain for a while longer.
“People still need to book in advance at least a week or a couple weeks, if you want to come on the weekend. Or if there’s a specific date in time you want to go to, definitely make sure you book in advance.”
Ms Loughran said there are four rooms upstairs for people to walk around through and she’s limited the number of visitors to 15 so the cats don’t become overwhelmed.
All the cats at the cat café have been taken from rescue shelters. “We went to two different shelters. The first one was in Geelong, the Geelong Welfare society, and the other one is the Lost Dog’s Home in North Melbourne, ” Ms Loughran said.
“We chose those shelters because we really like the facility. They do really try hard to do what’s best for the cats, which isn’t always easy for shelters. It was never a choice for us that it was going to be rescue animals, there was never a question about it.”
To Ms Loughran’s surprise, the cats have been getting along just fine.
“We were warned by vets and the shelters that they weren’t going to get along, we were going to face a lot of troubles. And then they all got along. We released most of them on the same day and so upstairs kind of became a neutral territory.
“They’re really closely bonded. They’ll sleep with each other, clean each other and play with each other. It’s amazing, because cats don’t usually act that way,” she said.
At night, the cats are free to roam around upstairs and do what they want.
“We know that they go up to mischief because sometimes we find their toys down the hall, down the staircase, chairs are tipped over … so they get up to trouble and we’ve got monitors that record overnight as well as during the day,” Ms Loughran said.
In the nine weeks of the cat café operating there have only been minor incidents between the cats and visitors.
“We’ve had a couple of little scratches, just really tiny,” Ms Loughran said, “We’ve had some people that have scratches and they come down all panicked thinking that they need to go to hospital.”
She said she understands that people who don’t know how to interact with cats tended to be the ones who worried about scratches.
The cat café has also had to overcome hurdles with the Melbourne City Council and laws regarding food hygiene.
Ms Loughran believes Australians will see a couple more cat cafes popping around the place.
“We have been contacted by (people from) around Australia saying that they want to open their own, asking how to go about it.”
Ms Loughran said she won’t be expanding her own business.
“It’s not a business you can franchise because you get really attached to it. It’s just such a personal business that I don’t think I could leave the cats upstairs for any long period of time to run another shop.”
