Cats Have Always Gotten the Leftover Space. Not Anymore

Founder’s Thoughts

Last weekend I went to my local pet store for something completely ordinary — a topical treatment for my cat. I walked the whole store twice and couldn’t find it. Finally I gave up and asked the woman at the register, and she pointed me to the dog section. That’s where they keep it, she told me. Not because it was a product for both animals. It was a cat product. It just lived in the dog aisle because that’s where the shelf space happened to be.

I found what I needed. But before I left, I stood there for a minute and actually looked around — really looked, which I’m not sure I’d ever done before. Aisle after aisle of dog food. Dog toys, dog beds, dog crates, dog treats, dog shampoo. Dog everything.

Cats got a stretch of wall.

How we got here

I want to be fair about this, because I honestly don’t think anyone did it on purpose.

The pet industry built itself around dogs for reasons that made sense at the time. Dogs are the louder customer. They need more gear, take up more square footage, and drive a bigger average ticket. They’re also easier to market — a dog will pose for the photo, show up to the event, wear the bandana. Thirty years of business decisions followed that logic, and honestly, the logic wasn’t wrong back then.

The problem is that defaults tend to outlive the reasoning behind them. What started as a practical call about shelf space slowly hardened into an assumption: dogs are the pet, and cats are the variation.

Once you notice it, you see it everywhere. The aisle layout. The marketing. And — this is the part that matters if you’re looking at this category as a business — the service side too.

Most places that advertise “cat boarding” are dog facilities with a room set aside. The air handling is shared. The noise carries. The staff were trained on dogs and are improvising on cats. The cat area is wherever the cat area fit, not where a cat would have chosen to be.

It’s the leftover-space problem all over again. Just with higher stakes than a misplaced tube of topical.

The numbers stopped agreeing a while ago

Here’s why this is more than an aesthetic complaint.

The household numbers have been moving in opposite directions for years — while the shelf space stayed pretty much where it was.

The American Pet Products Association projects that cat ownership will hit 35% of U.S. households by 2030. And the service side is expected to grow right along with it.

Two things stand out about this customer. First, they’re getting younger. Millennials and Gen Z now make up about half of U.S. cat owners, and they spend like people who consider the animal family — because they do. Second, they’re durable. Industry analysts keep finding the same thing: pet owners will cut back on their own spending before they cut back on the pet. That’s why this category holds up in conditions where a lot of consumer businesses don’t.

The product side has already caught on. Walk a pet industry trade show today and the cat section of the floor is genuinely busy — premium consumables, litter systems, enrichment, hydration-focused nutrition. Manufacturers are investing ahead of the demand.

The service side hasn’t caught up. That’s the gap.

Why “combined” doesn’t work

The most common pushback I hear goes something like this: isn’t it inefficient to build separately for two animals when one facility could serve both? I understand the math. I just think it’s the wrong math.

A cat is not a small dog. I know that sounds like a slogan. It isn’t.

You can’t solve any of that by partitioning a dog facility. You solve it by designing for cats from the floor up — which means a different building, a different staffing model, and a different set of skills.

That difficulty is exactly the point. Anything a competitor can copy by hanging a new sign isn’t a moat. This is not something a dog facility can add on a Tuesday.

What that looks like as a business

Specialization tends to sound like “smaller.” In this category, it’s the opposite.

A cat-only model concentrates on a customer who’s been underserved for decades and has almost nowhere else to go. That creates a few structural advantages worth understanding.

• Multiple revenue streams under one roof. Boarding anchors the business; grooming, enrichment and retail layer on top of the same footprint and the same customer.
• Repeat demand, not one-time demand. Boarding customers travel more than once a year and grooming is a schedule, not an event. You pay the acquisition cost once.
• A cheaper buildout than a dog facility. Cats need vertical space and quiet, not runs and yards — which changes both the square footage and the kind of site you are looking for.
• A referral network that already exists. Vets, shelters and rescue groups know what dog-adjacent boarding does to a nervous cat. They want somewhere to send people.
• Almost no direct competition. Try naming three cat-only brands in your market. That exercise is the opportunity.

Why MEOW! exists

For cats. Period.

Not cats and. Not cats too. Not a wing, not a room, not an afterthought at the end of an aisle.

We built around what cats actually need: dog-free air and dog-free sound, vertical space, low-stimulus environments, and a team trained to read a cat’s stress signals instead of a dog’s.

I don’t believe the industry ignored cats out of malice. I think it built for the customer in front of it and never went back to question the assumption. But the households have shifted. The spending has shifted. And cat owners have been quietly making do for a very long time.

They’ve earned better than the leftover space. The operators who build for them first are going to own those markets.

The angle you have been looking for

This is it. A growing customer base, a category the incumbents structurally can’t serve well, and a model built specifically for it.