Jaeshin Ha does his best to help stray animals
For 79-year-old Jaeshin Ha, who retired with his wife in 2019 after running a men’s clothing shop for four decades, business is actually booming.
Jaeshin Ha has been making beds for rescue cats for the last three years, and his dedication to his craft went viral on TikTok after his daughter Christina Ha posted a video showing a day in her dad’s life.
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“My parents were still in the process of figuring out what that retirement looked like when the pandemic started,” Christina Ha said. She and her parents first began sewing masks in 2020 after Christina and her husband decided to move back in with her parents.
“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 first cat café, as well as the president of Meow Parlor’s affiliated nonprofit, Meow Parlour Cats, Inc. So, naturally, cat beds came to mind — eventually.
“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,” Jaeshin 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 mom and dad are both “very detail-oriented” and Jaeshin Ha has very strong feelings about the quality of his work, so the family went through about four prototypes while developing the design for the perfect 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 prototypes 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 Ha and his wife make cat toys, too. They first started by sewing toys shaped 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 clownfish, 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 sold through Meow Parlour’s website, at the brick-and-mortar café, and through WhisksToWhiskers.com. For every bed sold, a portion goes to Meow Parlour’s nonprofit, and another portion goes to Christina’s parents for their hard work.
“The cat beds give my parents a sense of purpose in this part of their life,” Christina said.
But, most importantly, Jaeshin Ha and his wife are making life a little more comfortable for rescue cats all over the world.
