I am an animal lover, but I barely understand the cat thing; lazy tumbleweeds that act like snooty royalty and try to murder you if you scratch their bum too hard will never make my cut for a “family pet”, regardless of how silly they are with a laser-pointer. That being said, the numbers don’t entirely seem to be in my favor.
In the US alone, it is estimated that over 30% of homes have a cat, totalling somewhere between 70 and 100 million feline flatmates. What happens at home certainly doesn’t stay at home; approximately 45% of people uploading personal videos upload cat or other pet videos, and in 2014 alone, that resulted in about 2 million new cat videos purring in about 26 billion views. About 15% of all internet traffic is cat-related.
So as much as I can’t relate to the cat craze, I can’t say I was surprised to learn that as of yesterday, the Licki Brush Kickstarter campaign has wrapped up with full funding, earning just over $50K on a humble goal of $36,500. It turns out that a lot of people want to lick their, you know, cats (OH YOU WANTED ME TO GO THERE).
According to the folks behind Licki Brush, there is some evidence to suggest that cats see their owners as larger cats. The issue, of course, is that because we are not giant cats (though the jury is still out on whether or not Mark Zuckerberg is a giant lizard), and because cats are not tiny people, we miss out on a bunch of bonding opportunities – like licking each other. Remember, the human tongue is not built to fend off hairballs and very few cats have ever been members of a college sorority.
Licki Brush levels the playing field; you just chomp down on the bite panel with the tongue bristles facing away from you and run the soft silicon pad along your cat (according to the company) “when she is sleeping or in an otherwise pleasant mood”. Yup, that just about sums up the available bonding windows for cats.
Commence kitty communion.
This kitty contraption has received no shortage of attention. It has been featured on Kelly Ripa’s show:
And just last week, the founders were interviewed by Jimmy Kimmel:
With this recent round of funding, the Licki folks will be finalizing designs and materials through to September, starting production in October, and hopefully shipping units out to cat-lovers everywhere in January of 2017.
While I may not share the sentiment, I definitely admire the effort. Licki Brush is a great idea and at the moment, its founders are sitting pretty…
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Feature image courtesy Huffington Post
Benjamin Mann
Ben is a Toronto-based writer and public speaker with more than a soft spot for 90s hip hop. He has spent over 10 years in business & tech, more than 20 in the arts, and an entire lifetime in a state of perpetual judgment (highly recommended). He is the author of the blogs This Is Your Brain on Dating and Love Gone Cray and can be found pontificating on Thought Catalog, Notable.ca, The Toronto Standard, Offline Magazine, Gasm.org and Huffington Post.
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Why wouldn’t this thing get funded? The internet was built on cats, for cats and those that feel they rule the cats.
There are at least a dozen ideas like this that go viral with their crowd-funding campaign and work out. Of those 12, how many are still in business with that product or another?
Oh man. Gag gift written all over it. There is little surprise that this is something that has taken off and got funded, but what else are the inventors going to do when this ends up in Dollar Stores?
O M G. I thought the Squatty Potty was bad 🙂