The archive · Small Business & Money · Product decision · 1998–2024
Cat Flower Garden: Taipei's 1998 cat cafe that started a global category
A Taipei coffee shop owner brings her five street cats to work in 1998 — and the cat cafe, now a worldwide format, is born.
Cat Flower Garden
What it had to solve
Gracie Chang had always wanted a coffee shop of her own, but every street in Taipei already had one. She was raising five street cats at home, so she decided her shop would be different from any other on the street — the cats would come to work with her.
How it works
In 1998, Gracie Chang opened Cat Flower Garden in Taipei with five street cats she had raised at home — the world's first cat cafe. She had always wanted a coffee shop of her own, and she decided the only way to stand out from every other shop on the street was to make the cats part of the business.
For the first three months the cafe saw one or two guests a day. Then a local TV station made a programme about it, locals discovered the shop, and it grew into a global tourist destination — with the original five cats, known as 'the elders', still the house attraction.
The format travelled. Japan embraced it most enthusiastically, with around 150 cat cafes, and the United States passed 125. CNN counted cat cafes across Europe, India, Australia, Colombia and South Africa, while BBC reported the concept had opened in hundreds of cities from Thailand and France to Canada and New Zealand.
Two decades later the idea is a permanent hospitality category rather than a fad: cafes now take bookings in advance, control the ratio of people to cats, and sell the quiet cat time more than the coffee. The cafe later renamed itself Café Dogs & Cats.
Why it lands
- Instead of competing on coffee, the shop competed on an experience no other cafe could copy, so it became a destination rather than a commodity.
- Starting with what the owner already had — her own five cats — kept the first cost near zero and the differentiation total.
- A genuinely novel format invites the media to tell the story for you: one local TV programme turned a near-empty shop into a tourist attraction.
- The model travels because it packages something scarce in cities — relaxed time with animals — into an affordable outing, which is why it repeated in dozens of countries.
What it did
The cafe became a worldwide reference point, and the format spread everywhere: Japan embraced it most enthusiastically with around 150 cat cafes, the U.S. passed 125, and CNN counted cat cafes across Europe, India, Australia, Colombia and South Africa.
What you can take
You don't need a better product — you need a reason people cross town for. If the experience itself is the menu, a tiny shop can start a global category.
Since then
Cat Flower Garden later renamed itself Café Dogs & Cats, and the cats stayed the draw. The cat cafe became a worldwide hospitality category: Japan alone counted around 150 cafes, the U.S. more than 125, and hundreds more opened across Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa. In 2023, BBC World Service told the cafe's origin story on its Witness History programme, and the format keeps mutating — from cat bookshops and cat bars to adoption-focused cat cafes.
Sources
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