I can’t believe we’ve been doing this since 2012. It all started with my daughter Sofie making a couple of toys for our own cat. I was selling my Bits Of Fiber items at a Farmers Market in The Plains at the time and told her she should take some of those toys and try to sell them. And selling we did! I also had her set up her own Etsy shop which we named MauveMoose. Funny thing is that for a while she wanted to change it to MauveMice or MauveMouse but we had invested into the MauveMoose name with business cards etc so we decided to keep it as MauveMoose. Anyways, we thought we were nuts for taking our first large wholesale order of 475 strawberry catnip toys until we ended up making 5400, yup you are reading correctly ... 5 4 0 0 cat toys we made ... by hand!! We did use the sewing machine to stitch them but the cutting, filling, stuffing and sewing them once filled was all done by hand. We did ask a couple of friends to help us out with that order. But that was the end of the large wholesale orders. Me working full time, running my other Etsy shop, Bits of Fiber, Sofie going to school etc we decided to focus on just the retail part of the business. As time moves on, life moves on ... a lot has happened since 2012. My dear husband passed away, I sold and purchased another house, moved to a totally different part of Virginia and I’m planning on retiring by 2021. I’m looking forward to chapter #3 of my life that I hope will be filled with lots and lots of new projects, new people and new adventures and no need to panic ... I’ll continue making cat toys in between.
