Stories and updates on the MI Purr Palace Project!

Hello fellow cat and coffee lovers, we need Your help!

A lot of people are familiar, and even more do not know the concept of a cat café, which started in Taiwan, and became popularized in Japan. There are 6 opened in the United States so far, so the business doesn't really have a category yet, it's still quite new. With Your help, we can bring one to Michigan, the first of it's kind on our East Coast!

So what's this Cat Cafe all about?

It’s about cats benefiting from humans, and humans benefiting from cats, purr-fect symbiosis, if You will. It’s a café with light snacks, and around 20-30 cats running around at a time, in an open area, with the possibility of interacting with, feeding, petting, playing with, and possibly adopting their new furry friends.

Our main cat café, the Baldwin Purr Palace, will be catered and advertised primarily to tourists. We expect that the majority of our visitors are going to be women with their children, while men are hunting or watching sports nearby. With any luck, they will fall in love with the cats they find, and bring one into their home!

Baldwin has no proper adoption center for the cats, so we plan to have a building for the cats that we have adopted, allowing us to take care of them until they become acclimated enough to find permanent homes. Currently Baldwin has no way to deal with their stray cats, and puts an approximate average of 30 down every month. In many ways, the cafe will function as a no-kill shelter for them.


Health Benefits Behind the Purr and Fur

For those who are not aware, cats purr at a frequency of 20-120 Hz, and have been medically proven to lower blood pressure, decrease stress, promote healing of bone, ligaments, tendons and muscle, improve heart health, even reducing the risk of a heart attack by 40%, reduce dysponea, and even reduce infections and swelling!

In addition, while not really a health benefit, cats have developed their meows as a mimic to a baby's cry in order to have us help them. They've put a lot of work into having us take care of them, so we think it's only fair that we try!

Marketing
With marketing such a café as the first of it’s kind in MI, we expect, by means of billboards, online articles and marketing, word of mouth, not excluding TV, that we expect to get tourists to come to Baldwin from Ludington in the hundreds to thousands, depending on the season. They will bring their kids to see what a cat café is, enjoying all of the other things that Baldwin and it’s surroundings have to offer.

We are also planning to have a variety of bred cats, and will be available to play with the same way as with the primary adoption area. However, this is for the tourists, and to keep the cafe running, Our main worry is about finding the local cats a home.

We will need a separate area for food preparation, since it cannot be in any physical contact with the cats. Since the majority of our expected clients are going to be children, we hope to have a nice playground available, so we will need more land to complete development of our project. We are already in talks with Webber Township to acquire an acre directly north of the buildings we already have to make this play area a reality.

We would like to have a small souvenir shop to sell Baldwin-specific souvenirs, which may or may not be related to cats, fishing, hunting, and so on.

We expect to offer lower entrance fees and adoption fees for Lake County residents. There will be a tight need of networking with local hotels and motels in at least a 100-mile radius from Baldwin. We have already spoken with several area hotels in regards to offering discounts to visitors who come to the cafe.

We expect a large amount of clientele from Ludington, which is just to the West. Most of the other visitors are expected to be tourists, with Baldwin, Ludington, Mackinaw, and all other tourist towns in the area usually being flooded with people during the summer months. This is part of the reason that we are opening in July.

Food

There will be coffees, teas, and bubble teas available for drinks, as well as light snacks, including cat-shaped cookies, hunters sausages, and pancakes.

The idea of the development is to help people to stop thinking about their working existence, but to love and be loved. At the same time, the local cat population has no one taking care of them, and there are just as many people out there in need of the comfort only a cat can provide.



Success Stories

The first cat café in the US, and the first to succeed (To date, all have been successes in the US.), is Cat Town Café, over in Oakland, CA. Their success speaks for itself, but a large part of their success is the way they operate, which can be found on their website at www.cattowncafe.com/

As of right now, the locals of Baldwin are used to dealing with semi-wild cats, and don't care for them much. With Your help, we hope to bring our love of cats to this area, and into the hearts of the whole upper MI area!

Layout

As the moment, there are two buildings on our parcel, one of which will have to be removed, and another that will serve as the main cafe. Depending on which set of lots we acquire (the lots to the south are privately owned, while the ones to the north are Township-owned), the layout will change. If we acquire the lots to the south, we plan to connect 4 buildings in a conjoined square shape, with dedicated buildings for the Main Cafe, Food Preparation, Recovery/Shop, and another for Unusual Cats. If the land to the north turns out to be better, we plan to have the Main Cafe and Food Preparation buildings conjoined on the South side, with the Recover/Shop and Unusual Cat buildings, as well as playground area to the North.