ABOUT
Our purrr-fect beginning!
Hi, I’m Melony, and I’m excited to share with you the heartwarming tale of how The Kitty Cup came to life.
In late 2019, my husband and daughter became involved as volunteers with the Humane Society of the Treasure Coast working in the cat room. In early 2020, when the pandemic shut everything down, we became fosters for the shelter to help with getting animals into homes during the shutdown. Our foster cat was a 5-year-old boy named Frankie, a stray who had been brought into the shelter injured. Not long after Frankie joined our home, we knew this was going to be a foster fail. We adopted Frankie within two weeks of bringing him home with us.
I visited my first cat café in Omaha in 2021 and became a big fan of the cat café concept. Since that initial café visit, I have been to countless cat cafes, and in 2022, I decided I was going to quit my full-time job as an accountant at a local public accounting firm and work on opening a cat café in Port St. Lucie. I began volunteering with the Humane Society of the Treasure Coast and every week looked forward to my volunteer shift, caring for the cats.
In the summer of 2022 I was able to meet and speak about the cat cafe with Port St. Lucie Mayor Shannon Martin, an avid cat lover herself, and later discuss the concept with the city’s zoning and planning department, who prepared an update to the City’s zoning code specifically for cat cafes. The code amendment was passed by the City Council at the February 7th, 2023 City Council meeting.
Along with volunteering at the shelter, my daughter and I also became a foster home for the animals. We have fostered everything from singleton kittens (our most recent one we ended up adopting), a litter of six, (wow six is a LOT of kittens!) and once, a possibly pregnant hamster (spoiler alert, she was not pregnant). We have also provided a medical foster to a sweet cat who had bad allergies and needed a more controlled environment while we promoted him for adoption.
Back in 2020, when we brought home our sweet foster Frankie, I had no idea that cat would change the entire trajectory of my life. I am an accountant by profession and a licensed Enrolled Agent by the IRS, working in tax preparation and IRS representation for clients. I spent 9 years working for a local accounting firm before building my own book of business of tax clients and deciding to pursue my dream of opening a cat café.
I wasn’t one who subscribed to the concept of doing what you love for a living. I always felt more that my job was what I did so I could do the things I loved. I am lucky though, I truly enjoy being an accountant and worked for a wonderful firm for many years. Now, however, I think I may have hit the jackpot! I believe it is truly rare to love what you do for a living and feel good about doing it. The reward that comes along with assisting in getting homeless animals into loving homes is priceless.
All of this because in the spring of 2020, a little white and orange cat with one side of his back end shaved from surgery, walked into my home, and my heart.
Step into a world of whiskers, play, and purr-fection at The Kitty Cup. Explore the unique experience that awaits you.
