🐾 Hey friends! 🐾
Klaus thought you might be interested in hearing about how we came to open up our fabulous cat shop, which is a must-visit place for all cat lovers (of course, we would say that, wouldn't we? 😹) and has just celebrated its 7 year anniversary! 🥂
So get settled in for what will prove to be a bit of an epic story ha ha 😂
Going back into the mists of time... in 2011, and after many years of being owned by cats, Graham and Di welcomed two new Bengal kittens in to the cat family - Spot and Lula.
Weren't they just adorable?
Regrettably, Lula the Snow Bengal passed away from an aggressive liver tumour when she was 12 years old but we still have Spotty who is now 15 and as deaf as a post! Alongside his younger half brother and half sister - Annie and Spike who are now 12.
Here they are as kittens playing with the amazing Dave the Dragonfly toy which is no longer made in this design, which we are very sad about 😿
Anyway, Klaus is digressing 😸
So, when we got Spotty and Lula, we set up the Bengal Cat World blog which you can still see on our old website bengalcatworld.com though it has not been updated for a few years, and has lost a lot of the photos 😕 We also started going to cat shows and it was here that the seeds of our business started...
We launched a Facebook Page called Bengal Cat World which showcased all the exploits that the spotty terrors got up to, as well as their feline brothers and sisters. It was very successful with over 110,000 likes by 2023, but then it got stolen by scammers and we never got it back, despite trying to communicate with Facebook, who did absolutely nothing 😩
Back in 2012, we decided to try selling a few bits at the Bengal Cat Club show and we had a small 6ft stand selling mainly handmade crafty items, obviously all cat themed. It went very well, so we decided to have a stall at the next show, and the next, etc...
Here's a couple of pics of Annie at two different shows:
Now you see her...
Now you don't! 🥳
Over time our stalls got larger with more products (not just handmade crafty things), and we set up our first online store which had a tiny amount of product lines compared to what we have now, but again it did well and grew over time until we decided we needed a dedicated shop website which you've probably already seen being as you're reading this 😺
We must have had a lot of energy in those days to set up and break down stalls like this, which was a TICA two day show at Leatherhead, Surrey! 😂
The summer of 2018 was quite a busy time for us as we had a stall at the Llangollen Eisteddfod, with a famous guest popping in...
It's Alfie Boe in case you don't recognise him, with one of his biggest fans who was browsing our store when he walked in! She was clearly shocked but very pleased to see him! He has two cats 🐱🐱 or at least did at that time.
A month or so later, we did the Shrewsbury Flower Show which was a disaster as it tipped it down with rain pretty much the whole two days, but there was a silver lining to that cloud as we were next to John Challis who played Boycie in Only Fools and Horses, amongst other things. He was an author and publisher too and was there with his books.
He also popped in to our stall!
Him and his wife were so lovely, we chatted a lot (being as we had very few customers 😝), but he has since passed away and his wife has sold the large property they used to own in South Shropshire.
A couple of weeks after the Shrewsbury Flower Show, we decided to try something a little different and set up shop at Oswestry Indoor Market, here we are getting the space ready
Nearly there...
And then opening day!
Our goal was simple: to see how our products would appeal to the wider public, not just fellow cat lovers we met at cat shows. The market provided the purrfect opportunity to test the waters, offering a low-risk way to introduce Cat World to a whole new audience 😻
With our shelves stocked and plenty of feline-themed goodies on display, we were excited to see whether shoppers would be as smitten with our products as we were and on the whole it went ok, based on the actual footfall of the market 🙂
So we decided the time was right to take the plunge and find premises to open our very own place! 🛒 🛍 In the winter of 2018, we saw signs advertising new shops that were to be developed from an old bakery that had stood empty for some time, and made an appointment with the agent to take a look! 👀 It used to be Greggs and before that, Bakers Oven, but was pretty run down and in need of large scale refurbishment.
The owners had started to completely gut the property, so on our first visit it was a dark and dingy old building with no windows or electricity, with massive holes in the ceiling and broken tiles on the floor. It was just one big place with no partitions between the units and we had to use our iPhone torches to see where we were going 😱
So of course we said yes! This is purrfect! 🤗 And made an offer for the lease which began all the long-winded legal stuff 🥱
In the meantime, the refurbishment was moving along, and we visited again just to make sure... this time we had a tiny bit of light as the builders had opened up the back wall in what is now the Vets who, quite fortuitously, decided to take the large unit next to ours and opened their doors about 18 months after we did. Yay! 🥳
But we still had no windows 😅
The good thing about being the first occupiers of our shop was that we could decide all the important things such as the basic layout, where the electrical sockets would be, the lighting, the flooring, the paint finish etc, and we were even able to get larger than average windowsills which is of course important for a shop.
In early April 2019, the shop was taking shape and we could start to plan fixtures and fittings such as the counter and shelves
A few weeks later, at the end of April, it was almost ready to move into, we just had to finalise all the legal stuff and the builders had to finish off all the niggly bits (like a door on the toilet 🚽 😂)
We had a massive cat show in London the first weekend of May, which then gave us two weeks to prepare.... but finally we were ready to open our doors for the first time on May 18th, 2019! Phew! 😀
And we are still here today! We've been through COVID, multiple lockdowns and cost of living crises but through the support of our wonderful customers from Oswestry and beyond we continue to expand our ranges and fill our shop to the brim with sooooo much kitty wonderfulness!
Of course, we still sell online too and we have exciting news to share on that front as we will shortly be launching a brand new, updated website! It will still feature all your favourites, just with an updated look and feel! We hope you will like it as much as we do! 🧡🧡🧡
1 comment
Perfect little shop for all sorts of cat themed gifts. It has to be my favourite shop in Oswestry.