Founder's Story!                  Before Purrabode

My name is Olivia, and before Purrabode, I was just another pet owner trying to make two very different animals feel at home in the same small apartment. I grew up with cats, but my partner grew up with dogs — so when we moved in together, our home came with Max, his golden retriever mix, and Biscuit, my orange tabby who'd never shared a roof with a dog in her life.

They got along fine. Our furniture did not.

The Problem That Started It All

Biscuit shredded the arm of our couch within a month. So I did what everyone does — I went looking for a scratching post. What I found was either flimsy cardboard towers that fell apart in weeks, or beige carpeted structures that looked like they belonged in a kennel, not our living room.

I bought three different ones over that first year. Biscuit ignored two of them completely and wrecked the third within days. Meanwhile, Max needed his own bed, and every dog bed I found was either shapeless foam or something covered in cartoon paw prints. Nothing was built to actually last, and nothing looked like it belonged in an adult's home.

I remember sitting on the floor one night, surrounded by product reviews on my laptop, thinking: someone needs to make pet furniture for people who care what their home looks like — and for pets who actually use it.

Building the First Prototype

  • I had no background in furniture design. What I had was a notebook full of napkin sketches, a lot of late nights researching sisal rope and solid wood joinery, and a local carpenter willing to humor my very specific, very stubborn requests.
  • The first prototype was too tall — Biscuit wouldn't climb it. The second was the right height but the sisal unraveled within two weeks of her scratching it daily. The third finally held up, but Max kept trying to use it as his own bed, which is how I realized the design needed to work for both of them, not just one.
  • It took eleven revisions over nearly a year before I had something that survived both a determined cat and a 60-pound dog who thought everything in the house belonged to him. By the end, Biscuit had claimed it as her favorite spot in the apartment — and so, often, had Max.

From One Lounger to a Brand

Friends who visited our apartment kept asking where I'd bought it. When I explained I'd built it myself out of sheer frustration, more than one of them said, "I'd buy that." That's the moment Purrabode stopped being a one-off project and became a real idea.

I named it Purrabode — "purr" for the sound Biscuit makes when she's finally settled, and "abode" for the home we built around both of our pets. The first product we ever sold was the same lounger that started it all, now refined and made repeatable: the Purrabode Scratch Lounger.

Today, Purrabode is still guided by the same question that started it: would this work for a home with both a cat and a dog in it? If the answer is yes, we build it. If it's no, it doesn't ship. That's the whole philosophy — built by someone who lived the problem, for anyone else living it too.

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