Hundreds of hours of research, design and prototyping has gone into the CATSA Shelter Project so far. In fact, CATSA already has secured a design patent and has potential manufacturers lined up. We are committed to fabricating these shelters in the USA and want to do so as cost effectively as possible to get lots of them produced.

The ideal outdoor cat shelter needs to be durable, insulated, weather-tight, tip / roll-resistant and have two exit door options. Keeping the shelter affordable is important to us, but so are ease of use and environmental considerations. The packaging industry has already figured out some smart, recyclable options to move temperature-sensitive products in efficient, cost effective ways, so we began to tweak some of these parameters to adapt them for our needs.

While the Catsanauts were helping us work through prototypes and dial in the production details for our Shelter Project, the specter of COVID-19 descended and we found ourselves with a real dilemma. We knew the initial tooling costs for the fabrication molds would be expensive and we were determined not to cut quality. After crunching and re-crunching the numbers, the start-up costs were just too high to absorb without crowd-sourcing or some additional funding. We simply did not feel that this is the right time to launch on a crowd-funding platform given the financial upheaval everyone is enduring. 

After much discussion we reprioritized, shifted our focus and this is how the CATSA Limited Object Projects such as the Lander Mark1 came to be. The idea seemed simple enough – make the coolest, limited-edition, space-themed, cat-centric design objects possible and invest our proceeds in moving the Shelter Project forward. Repeat as necessary.

Please stay tuned as we are planning to circle back to this project as soon as we are able to! Updates will be sent via email, so please sign up below to be notified when we are moving forward. Thanks for your interest and stay safe and well out there!