CATHOLE PURPOSE

The purpose of CATHOLE is to help you hide kitty’s litter box behind a closed inside door.  It installs easily in a basement, laundry room or spare closet door.  With the door closed, kitty can get to the litter box while dogs and toddlers are locked out.

The messy litter box is also isolated from the home “living space” providing a much improved environment for the family and guests.  Many families also used CATHOLE to keep their dogs away from the cat food.

Our experience is that 99% of all cats can easily get through this cat door.  However, if you have a very large cat, send us an email at cathole@ameritech..net and we will help you make your decision. 

CAT Safety

Many cat owners are concerned about the safety of their cats and do not let them go outside. There are numerous articles written about the hazards that cats can experience when allowed outside. The Humane Society addresses this issue ………….

“There’s a fairly simple solution to the problem of cats getting themselves into trouble, as well as killing and injuring wildlife: Keep them indoors. In recent decades, the U.S. has experienced a welcome shift in this direction. The proportion of owned cats kept entirely in the house rose from 56 percent in 1998 to 64 percent in 2008, according to a survey by the American Pet Products Association. Still, a significant number continue to wander … Keep cats inside for their own safety … “

CATHOLE is a unique cat door that is designed for those owners who are concerned about this safety issue and keep their cats inside.

Attractive & Easy

CATHOLE has attractive arch frames.

The CLASSIC model, introduced in 1999, has furniture quality baltic birch frames. The wood frames can be painted or stained to match most any décor.  (Many CLASSIC models have been stained to match oak doors.)

Over 80,000 of the CLASSIC models have been sold and we have received very positive feedback from our customers. 

The ECO model, introduced in 2020, has very attractive molded plastic frames and a new molded rubber brush.

Both models have removable brushes that groom kitty and collect loose cat hair. The brushes snap in and out easily for cleaning.

These cat doors install easily.

Many of our customers also comment on the fact that CATHOLE comes with complete easy-to-follow instructions.

History

It all started in 1992. We, like many cat owners, wanted to put our cat’s litter box in the basement.  We didn’t want to leave the door open. So we made a cat door by cutting a small arch-shaped hole in the door. This worked fine, but we didn’t like the appearance and Motchka’s loose hair was constantly collecting on the edge of the hole.

We made a pair of arch-shaped wood frames to cover the hole and painted them.  We then looked for a way to fill the void between the frames and decided that a brush would be the ideal choice.  It would collect loose cat hair efficiently and would help keep our house cleaner.

We decided ‘CATHOLE’ would be a good name for our cat door because it resembled a large mouse hole.  The name became the butt (excuse the pun) of many jokes by our friends.  Regardless, we liked the name and have had it trademarked.  CATHOLE became a conversation piece. “Why don’t you patent it?” We received our Patent in 1995.

This was only the beginning of a long voyage.  Even though our sales are doing quite well, we are still a “mom and pop” company.  Our company has become a major effort for us – after we retired.  On January 1, 2022, our son Dan took over the CH Enterprise, LLC.

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Marketing

There are many costs that must be managed.  However, none is as difficult to foresee and manage as the cost-of-sales.  It is easy to get a handle on development, engineering and even manufacturing costs.  High costs-of-sales can easily leave you selling at a loss!  While most of corporate America has faced this in the past few years, and much has been written, it does not hit home until you try to sell your product at a profit.

Our experience may help some of you who are thinking about starting a small business.  We suggest you give a lot of thought to cost-of-sales – both dollar cost and time (your time) cost.  Experts say that the mortality rate for small businesses is very high.  We suspect that most of these failures result from underestimating the cost of sales.  We have met many inventors and would-be entrepreneurs.  Many of these people think that all you need is a superior product or service, and it will sell itself.  Not true for us (and probably not true for most others).  Additionally, many small businesses may fail because too much emphasis is placed on obtaining venture capital?  Once this money is available, it can easily be gambled away on marketing efforts that provide questionable return.

We chose to boot-strap our growth with our early profits – a very conservative approach.  This cautious approach hasn’t made us rich.  However, it is helping us achieve sustained growth.  This should lead to long-term success.

Since we were the first CAT DOOR on the market, we received number one rankings under GOOGLE and other search engines.  This supported our early “direct ship” fulfillment.

We started selling wholesale in 2005.  We began selling on AMAZON in 2006.  Our sales continue to grow dramatically.

Our Patent expired and we were no longer the only CAT DOOR.  A few companies picked up our concept and imitated our design. They also manufactured this imitation offshore. With no development cost and offshore manufacturing, they produce a product at a small fraction of our cost.  This enables them to use their extremely high margins to leverage various aspects of e-commerce marketing.

This type of “competition” is challenging to face.

We have an extremely popular, high-quality, Made-in-America product. We will meet this challenge and are searching for a Marketing Partner that will help us move forward.

Design

Our cat door has gone through four major design changes.  The initial design was fine for our use – but it had too many nonstandard parts and was too difficult to install.  So we simplified it.

In our second design, we were making the wood frames from solid wood blanks.  These met our aesthetics criteria, however, they were not strong enough.  We introduced Baltic Birch frames to address this quality issue.  Furniture-grade Baltic Birch is attractive, can be painted or stained and is very strong and durable.

Our third design change resulted from a supplier problem.  We were using a brush made by a large company.  Rubbermaid Corporation, a very large company, bought this company out and decided to discontinue the brush line we had been using.  We weren’t (and still aren’t) big enough for Rubbermaid to care about our business.  So, after a country-wide search, we found a very stable, high-quality family-owned brush manufacturer in Vermont.  This whole painful experience turned out to be a real blessing.  Our new brush is perfect and our new supplier is a delight to work with!

Some of our customers had asked for white frames.  So we added our new ECO product with the frames made of attractive molded white plastic and a molded rubber brush.  We made this design change in 2020 and added this very popular product.  

Fulfillment

We started our business by selling online through our website.  Then AMAZON came along – then Chewy, etc.  We learned that these powerhouse marketing companies had a lot to offer. Direct sales has a larger profit margin.  However, much of our business today is wholesale to these marketing giants…………..

Challenges in Running a Small Business

There are an endless number of challenges in making a small business profitable.  As long as we can continue to learn from these challenges (without going broke), the business will continue to be fun. We started out by reading everything we could get on small businesses, attended small business consulting classes, and used local resources such as an Inventor’s Club and SBA. The real lessons, however, were learned first hand. We learned the cost of making design changes – obsolete inventories, rework, etc. We learned how difficult (and important) it is to find good suppliers. We also learned that the real work begins when you try to market your product.