A cat cafe in midtown? Mother, daughter plan to launch Sacramento’s first this winter

Laura and Emalee Owsley, a mother-daughter duo from Sacramento, spent years working separately in the food and customer service industries. Both wanted to do something new. What they came up with is very new to Sacramento: a cat cafe, the city’s first, which plans to launch this winter.

“It was almost a game of chicken. Are we doing this? Who’s gonna back down first?” Emalee Owsley, 25, said. “Neither of us did and we kept pursuing it.”

The pursuit led to an announcement in July that Capital Cat Cafe would come to midtown this winter. The company’s Instagram page already has more than 1,800 followers. A few promotional materials on the page starred two orange tabby cats Ricky and Lucy, who Emalee rescued three years ago.

“We love cats. It’s always been something we both cared about,” Laura Owsley, 57, said. “We’ve been looking into cat cafes for the past 10 years.”

The mother-daughter duo has toured Cat Cafes across the globe, one in New Zealand and another in Australia. They felt particularly inspired by the pop-up stores in Oakland and how they approached partnering with the community.

“That’s our goal, too. If you can’t adopt a cat, you can sponsor a cat. If you can’t sponsor a cat, you can help pay for vet appointments so an elderly person can have a cat,” Laura X said. “Those are the types of partnerships we want.”

While the pair is still negotiating property deals in midtown, they plan to launch the Capital Cat Cafe at the end of the year. In the Owsleys minds’, customers will walk into a store reminiscent of the Great Gatsby: a spacious green-and-pale-pink room with velvet seating, gold accents – “maybe event a chandelier or two,” said Laura”– and a seated bar that peers into a window where the cats will be.

“Nothing pretentious,” Laura Owsley said. “We want people to be comfortable.”

After all, she hopes the store can be a place for college students or hospitals workers can unwind by hanging out with some kittens. In doing so, they also store can help animal shelters with overcrowding.

Sacramento has a tumultuous journey in providing cats homes. In 2018, animal shelters across Sacramento stopped admitting healthy stray cats because of an overwhelming surge in kittens and feral cats.

“We have a very high rate of stray cats and of euthanization in our shelters in this county, so anything we can do to decrease that number would be helpful,” said Emalee.