In designing the largest cat café in the DMV, the wish list of amenities stretched long.
Architectural renderings for Ruth Wang and Brendan Morrison’s Luna Cat Collective’s café and coworking space included air-locking doors and exhaust fans for the litter box room. A washer-dryer hookup was added so smelly laundry wouldn’t need to be lugged offsite. Pine cabinetry was abandoned for white oak, hard enough to endure razor sharp claws.
By the time the owners were satisfied, the estimated cost had ballooned to more than half a million dollars.
“We will be having cats live in the business, so that means the business has to be amazing,” Morrison said.
The entrepreneur couple are forging ahead with plans to open the Taiwanese-style café in Howard County by December. They have signed a 10-year lease on a 4,775-square-foot space in Ellicott City’s Normandy Business Center and secured the necessary permitting to begin construction.
Although they are confident in their long-term business plan, Wang and Morrison are turning to the community and animal lovers for help drumming up the funds to offset the six-figure price tag for construction. They set a goal of raising $150,000 through an online fundraiser, though Morrison said their estimated expenses have since crept higher.
The venture is deeply personal for Wang, who settled on the cat café concept to fulfill her mother’s deathbed wish.
Before she died of ovarian cancer in 2020, Bridget Wang had emigrated from Taiwan with her husband and settled in Maryland to raise her family. She worked for years as a registered nurse and had a knack for juggling side hustles, her daughter recalled. There were gigs teaching piano, selling and managing vending machines, treating patients at a tuberculosis clinic and even a stint at the National Gallery of Art.
That labor, Ruth Wang said, gave her adult children more choices in life — a personal sacrifice that is familiar to many first-generation children of immigrants.
After Bridget Wang’s diagnosis in 2018, her perspective on hard work changed as she sat inside the chemo clinic receiving infusions. Ruth Wang recalled her mother looking at the other patients in the room and wondering aloud how many had also worked themselves to the bone.
“Nobody is enjoying life,” Ruth Wang recalled her mother saying. “I want you to do what you want and to not get stressed to the point of getting sick.”
Bridget Wang was 63 when she died in Taiwan on March 20, 2020. In the months that followed, her daughter went through an “existential crisis” trying to figure out what it was that made her happy — a particularly difficult thing to do while grieving the loss of a parent.
Ruth Wang had studied physical therapy in college, but worried that a career in a medical field would take a toll on her body. She had been working a flexible part-time job at Starbucks while her mom was sick, but didn’t want to be a barista forever.
In the meantime, she was leaning hard into artwork and painting pictures of birds and cats. Morrison noticed his partner wasn’t eating much and suggested they adopt a cat to keep her company while he traveled as a professional athlete in the nascent sport of tricking, a fusion of martial arts and gymnastic floor routines. (Morrison’s parents operate Kinetic Ninja Warrior in Bel Air).
“I wasn’t taking care of myself,” Wang said from the living room of her Baltimore County home. The pair of kittens they adopted — Aurora and Astraea — slinked between the couple to paw at some nearby catnip-stuffed toys.
“When you take care of something else, you take care of yourself a lot more,” Morrison replied.
Earlier in their relationship, the couple had joked about opening a cat café as a retirement plan. Retirement came earlier than expected for Morrison’s athletic career when he tore his Achilles tendon in 2022.
Within a year, the couple decided to go all-in on a Taiwanese-inspired cat café to realize Bridget Wang’s wish for her daughter to do what made her happy — and these days, that’s the companionship of cats.
In a way, the matriarch’s prescription to avoid stress has extended by proxy to the foster cats that will live in Luna Cat Collective’s brick-and-mortar space. After Wang and Morrison toured other cat cafés along the East Coast during their market research, they felt gloomy about the lack of space or enrichment activities for some of the animals they encountered.
Some facilities didn’t give the felines space to escape the humans if they became overwhelmed. Proprietors advised them to completely outfit their space from the start because upgrades would be difficult to make once the fosters moved in. They recommended washable rugs, an on-site washer-dryer and a sink specifically for washing the cats.
Wang and Morrison are bootstrapping some of the more whimsical cat amenities — like a wooden tree structure and custom-designed cat treadmills. They’ve already spent six figures on the project and expect their personal contribution, which is coming from the inheritance Wang received from her mom’s estate, to topple $170,000 by the time the space opens. Any costs beyond that will need to come from the online fundraiser or bank financing, they said.
They acknowledge they are taking a risk in starting a niche business and spending so much capital upfront. They said they have revised their business plan multiple times, run it past county staff, bankers and other cat café proprietors.
The outcome of the fundraiser won’t affect their commitment to the project, they said. What it will buy is a quality sanctuary for the roughly 30 adoptable cats they’re expecting to foster in the space. Wang and Morrison chose to fundraise instead of finding an angel investor in order to retain their independence, and were told they’re ineligible for most grants. But that’s okay with them.
“We want our asses on the line and no one else’s,” Morrison said.
Visitors to the Luna Cat Collective will pay for entry similar to a co-working space plus a few furry colleagues — ranging from $30 for 45 minutes to $115 for seven hours. The prices are slightly higher than other cat cafés the couple visited because they want to make sure the business is sustainable. They don’t want an emergency cat surgery to wipe out the coffers.
Coffee and tea will be complimentary for customers, reducing the burden of health code compliance. Cat adoptions will be managed by a nonprofit partner, Small Miracles Cat & Dog Rescue.
Wang and Morrison are quick to acknowledge their plan is ambitious, but they’re determined to build a safe, serene environment with Bridget’s wish in mind.
“She wanted me to focus on doing what makes me happy,” Wang said. “That was the most important thing.”
