Leili Farzaneh and Kevin White’s cat dislikes wearing collars and went missing one day. When they finally found their cat, Leili and Kevin looked into why cat collars were so uncomfortable and discovered they were designed with dogs in mind. The duo started Supakit to design their own cat accessories. In this episode of Shopify Masters, Leili and Kevin share their process of product development and how they expanded their business with an online course. Don’t miss an episode! Subscribe to Shopify Masters. Show Notes Store: Supakit Social Profiles: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram Recommendations: Learnworlds, Loox, Klaviyo How these founders stumbled across their winning business idea Felix: The birth of this idea really came out of a scary time for you. Tell us more about what happened. Leili: It was a real nightmare. A strange way to start a business. We have a cat called Lola, and she was quite young at the time. We live in London and it’s fairly normal to let your cat have access to the outdoors, at least for certain parts of the day. We’d let her go out and about, but one day she didn’t come home. We were really worried about her, not just because we were concerned about her whereabouts, but she didn’t have a collar. She had removed every single one that we tried to put on her. We were burning through cash. It was getting so frustrating that we gave up. When she went missing, we knew that we’d messed up. She had no collar on, she had no ID, and she was just roaming the streets. We were distraught cat parents. Kevin: Luckily, we did get her back. Through a local group we put a message out, and we got her back. We promised to try harder. We were like, we have to make it our mission to get her to wear a collar, and to keep it on. Leili: It was really serendipitous at this time. Our two cats were fighting quite a bit, and we’d been in touch with our veterinarian about ways that we could help them More specifically to help our more active cat expend her hunting energies in play, and not towards her sister. The vet had recommended that we try to find natural materials and create homemade toys out of them, for Lola to play with. I had loads of scraps of leather and other materials lying around, so we just started experimenting. Our big breakthrough was when we realized that A, it’s not a dead set that cats are going to remove their collars. They don’t have to be intrinsically uncomfortable. They also don’t have to intrinsically be bulky in a way that can snag on things. We knew we wanted to put a safety buckle in. That’s the tricky thing, is it should spring open in an emergency scenario. When we started using natural materials, we found that our cat was just so much more comfortable in them, because scent is a really important sensory modality for cats. Then, we also started working with materials that were really lightweight and slim lined, so that we could create a collar that didn’t have a profile on our cat’s neck, so they forgot it was there, and it couldn’t get snagged. Kevin: The leather just seemed to come together. We had to make it strong enough, but also light and flexible enough so that the material wouldn’t aggravate the sensation that a cat has against its fur. It’s so important, we hadn’t considered it enough. When we found that leather stayed on, we were like, that’s great we’ll make a collar out of leather then. Leili: We knew we kept our one tricky customer happy. She was tricky. That was how it all started. Then, we found that other cats were just as fussy about their collars, and it went from there. Kevin: We realized it when we researched, “how do you get your cat to keep their collar on?” and realized that loads of people had the same problem, and that collars were almost considered semi-disposable, in that you’d buy a pack of five from Amazon, and you’d get through them in a certain amount of time. Then you’d just go and buy another one. We thought, that doesn’t seem to make sense. They’re obviously not ha...