Faith-Ashleigh Wong & Shane O’Higgins, co-owners of Purrs & Beans, talk to Tom Raynel about taking over a longstanding business, and why they care about how the animals are looked after. Each Monday, we interview a small business owner, which is now a regular feature of NZME’s editorial campaign On
Small Business: Purrs & Beans cat cafe offers service with a smooch
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Purrs & Beans co-owner Shane O’Higgins with one of the furry faces that live in Auckland's longest-running cat cafe.
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What inspired you to take over the business?
We were familiar with the business, having previously worked part-time in it, before taking it over in 2017. We were trying to keep the “forever home” going for these cats, and that was the initial draw to the business. It was never really about making money.
I guess at the beginning we were thinking if we could break even that would be good. That was always the goal to kind of get it generating enough funds so it will cover vet bills, rents, staff and things like that.
What work do you do with groups like the SPCA?
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The biggest one would be fostering, so we provide homes to some of our cats. We’re quite lucky because of the layout of our space; we can facilitate quite a few different types of cats. One, for example, was a mum and six kittens that were essentially wildcats in a colony in Beach Haven. They managed to trap them, so they brought them in.
The mother was effectively quite feral, spitting and hissing initially. It’s quite scary when you get a cat like that. But they felt they saw signs that she might be able to be socialised. With cats like that, they normally de-sex and then release them back into the wild so that they’re able to live out their lives and not produce more kittens. We wanted to keep mum and the kittens together, and we were able to facilitate that for the rescue, which is really cool. It’s been quite slow progress, but mum now lets us pet her better.
The kittens are to different degrees super smoochy, they’re really getting there, and we’ve actually managed to adopt two of them already, to their forever home.
How was the move from Auckland City centre to Birkenhead?
Our old location was a really high foot traffic on Quay St, but both the council and our previous landlord had quite strict rules around signage. So even though we had this fantastic location, it was very hard for people to actually know where we were.
Now have a 13m patio with an extension on the outside. You can see straight away from when we moved the cats to the new location that they absolutely love it. We’re on a relatively main road here in Birkenhead, but we’re slightly off the road, which is a perfect balance because the cats have a nice quiet environment down the back. They’re not street facing, we’ve got a lovely little tree line that lots of birds and things come to run around that they can kind of watch and look at. They’ve got a nice sort of tranquil space.
What would be your advice to other budding entrepreneurs wanting to start a business?
The biggest thing I think would be to research what you want to do. In our case, we didn’t go into this with our eyes closed; we knew what the model was. Before we were even thinking of taking over the business, we were asking ourselves, how does this actually work? How are they able to make enough money to pay themselves a wage, and I was always thinking this is quite interesting.
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Try to speak to people who are doing it already. Find out if there is demand for what you want to do, because ultimately, you might want to do something that’s a great idea, but it’s not the right space.
Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business, retail and tourism.
