Dad Spends Every Day Of Retirement Making Beds And Toys For Rescue Cats

For many individuals, retirement suggests relaxing and unwinding after several years of building a profession.

But for 79-year-old Jaeshin Ha, who retired with his partner in 2019 after running a guys’s clothes buy 4 years, business is really thriving.

Jaeshin has actually been making beds for rescue cats for the last 3 years, and his devotion to his craft went viral on TikTok after his child Christina Ha published a video revealing a day in her daddy’s life.

“[My parents] were still in the process of figuring out what that retirement looked like when the pandemic started,” Christina Ha informed The Dodo. She and her moms and dads initially started stitching masks in 2020 after Christina and her partner chose to return in with her moms and dads.

“It was a very interesting and stressful time, and we kept making masks for a few months,” Christina said. “Afterward, we found ourselves with a lot of fabric, so we started thinking about what we could do with it.”

Christina is a cofounder of Meow Parlor, New York City’s very first cat café, in addition to the president of Meow Parlor’s connected not-for-profit, Meow Parlour Cats, Inc. So, naturally, cat beds entered your mind — ultimately.

“I don’t remember how we ended up on cat beds, especially since my cats never used the beds we got them, but we thought maybe our cats wanted something different,” Ha said. “Over the summer, we started making prototypes, and I think by October, our cats had finished testing them out and it was clear there was a winner.”

According to Christina, her mother and father are both “very detail-oriented” and Jaeshin has extremely strong sensations about the quality of his work, so the family went through about 4 models while establishing the style for the ideal cat bed.

“My dad is very quiet, but he’s also very observant, so he noticed little things like whenever he would lay out a piece of fabric, a cat would come and sit in the middle of it,” Christina said. “So from the beginning, he wanted [the bed] to be flat. Everything else was about making the bed more appealing to the cats.”

To test the beds, the family turned the models over to cat fosters and adopters. “We also would wash the beds to see how they held up and would put them in various parts of the house to see if they would choose the bed,” Christina said. “We were fortunate that the original concept made sense and it was just a matter of improving the quality and making sure it was more durable to withstand multiple washes.”

Jaeshin and his partner make cat toys, too. They initially begun by stitching toys formed like starfish, ladybugs, turtles and even kimbap (a Korean rice roll). “From the beginning, they had made a lot of ocean-themed shapes, like the seahorse and shark, because my dad had this theory that cats love fish,” Ha said. “I really doubt that cats have ever interacted with seahorses or clown fish, but I’m not here to correct my dad when he’s having fun.”

When they’re in stock, the family’s handmade beds are offered through Meow Parlour’s website, at the brick-and-mortar café and through WhisksToWhiskers.com. For every bed offered, a part goes to Meow Parlour’s not-for-profit, and another part goes to Christina’s moms and dads for their effort.

“The cat beds give my parents a sense of purpose in this part of their life,” Christina said.

But, most significantly, Jaeshin and his partner are making life a little bit more comfy for rescue cats all over the world.