Dear friends of Cuddles Cat Cafe, We have just gotten our license approval this afternoon and were finally, finally, OPENING TOMORROW! (Thursday, 18th September) Location: *Scape, 2 Orchard Link #03-01 Opening Hours: 11am-11pm daily Cuddle Fee: $12 for first hour, $3 per subsequent 15 mins Menu and Pricing: Canned Drinks $1.30 Bottled Drinks $1.90 Large variety of snacks starting from $1 Individually wrapped Japanese snacks at $1.50 each Delicious Ice Cream & Cookie Co. items! Brownie $3 Mousse $4 Ice Cream Cookie Sandwich $5.50 Youll be able to order food from our neighbour Fish Tales from our cafe! They have an amazing menu ranging from Prawn Aglio Olio, Cheesy Fish & Chips, to Soft Shelled Crab Pasta! We also have a small selection of board games for our cats to share with you! Thank you for all your kind support these past few months and being so patient with us! Despite many attempts on our part to change AVA’s stand, we have been restricted to a limit of 20 cats at the cafe regardless of the cafe’s size. AVA’s rationale was that if the business were to fail, it would be difficult to rehome more cats. However, we feel that this weird illogical limit is unrealistic and in fact poses more problems and risks to our cats than if a proper limit based on how much space the cats live in. As you may have noticed from the photos of our premises, our floor space is much larger than the average cat cafe at 2500sqft. If AVA fairly dictates the number of cats based on the amount of space our cats can live in, we should have been approved for at least 60 cats on our premises based on the existing cafes already approved by AVA. Conversely, if the regulations imposed on Cuddles Cafe were applied to other cat cafes, they would only have 4-5 cats allowed at their current premises. Our staff allocation also accounts for a large number of cats as we have more staff to cater for more cats. We do not prepare food or drinks at the cafe, and almost every inch of the cafe is free for our cats to roam (except the back store room and lobby). From our experiences at overseas cat cafes which we have personally visited, having 50+ cats in an 1000-1500 sqft area (50% the size of Cuddles Cafe) posed no problems at all to both the cats and patrons there. In fact, customers also had a better experience and were more excited about visiting the cafes again as they were able to interact with the cats. Given the 20 cat restriction, our concerns lie with the short-term and long-term well being of our cats. On a short-term basis, we feel that allowing too many patrons into an area with few cats tends to leave the cats stressed and aloof to human interaction. This is taken to an extreme if we follow through with our original plan, with a maximum capacity of 80-100 patrons (the previous tenant at Cuddles Cat Cafe had up to 120-200 patrons in the same space) Obviously, having a 4 patrons:1 cat would result in a very unsatisfying experience for both our feline family and our customers. We’re currently hoping to avoid this by restricting the number of patrons for the well-being of the cats, sacrificing our own earnings at this critical initial period. The Cuddles feline family has also been together for many months, most since kittenhood, and are closely bonded. They might experience anxiety if we have to split up cats that are good friends and siblings to move only some to the cafe. Also, in the long-term, a dissatisfying experience of our patrons, leading to poor business, could result in a much higher risk of our cats being ultimately rehomed. We are all too aware that cat cafes are a novelty in Singapore, and our business model aims to ensure that all our cats can find their forever homes at the cafe. Thus, we planned our cafe around attracting repeat customers for years to come. We are attempting to contest AVA’s decision at the moment by engaging in discussion with them, and also garnering public support for our cause. Who will be in the final Cuddles roster? We know many of our cats have a fan following on their profiles and we really hope your favorites are here! The rest of the cats are being well-pampered at home. We want you to meet them too. However, AVA has imposed a blanket limit of 20 cats across all cat cafes in Singapore regardless of the cafes size. We found this rather frustrating since they did not inform us of this limit before we rented out the lovely space at SCAPE. All our plans had already accounted for a large number of cats and we were more than prepared to accommodate about 50 cats at the cafe. On top of that, they have further only specifically approved 12 of our cats to make up our initial feline crew. Weve been spending the past few months trying to push for more cats given our huge 2500sqft floor space, but due to various difficulties and lots of anticipation from our fans we have no choice but to begin operations with AVA’s restrictions. Its been painful for us to turn away customers who wanted to hold special events here and really couldnt wait for us to open, and the kind management at SCAPE has already more than given us the benefit of the doubt in waiting for us to begin operations. Due to various restrictions placed on us by AVA, we have sadly been limited to open with only 12 cats at the cafe only during this initial opening period. In order not to stress our beloved felines, we thus have to limit the number of customers to 30 as well. These are the 12 cats that will be at the cafe: Cuddles Puffles Casper Milk Tea Mittens Muffin Snowflake Cloudy Baileys Calico Waffles Choco Our online booking system at cuddlescafe will be prepped up and ready to launch from tomorrow onwards (currently the web developers are in the midst of testing it properly). As for now, feel free to walk in if you wish to come visit us! We hope that youd be able to enjoy yourself here with our precious babies!
Posted on: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 15:25:44 +0000
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