Long Beach resident Ashley Likins was pages away from finishing “Onyx Storm,” the third installment in Rebecca Yarros’ fantasy book series, when a long-haired black kitten hopped into her lap.
Given the foster name Soup Enhancements, the cat was one of the rescues boarding at Cool Cat Collective, a cat-themed boutique at the eastern end of Long Beach’s Fourth Street Corridor. The store, which offers all manner of cat-themed merchandise from kitty treats to cat-printed coasters, doubles as a shelter for cats rescued by TippedEars, a local trap-neuter-return, or TNR, nonprofit.
These resident kittens at Cool Cat Collective spend most of their time in a luxury “catio” in the back corner of the boutique, but twice a month, they are released to roam about during after-hours fundraising events. A popular silent reading party, co-hosted by reading club LB Bookworms, mimics a cat cafe, and according to the book club’s founder, Martha Esquivias, the event has sold out nearly every month since its debut last November.
It was during the silent reading event in early August that Likins sat, second-guessing the decision she’d made a few days prior to adopt Soup Enhancements. She adored the cat; still, she worried she’d been impulsive and wasn’t truly ready for the responsibility of pet ownership.
But as she watched the kitten nod off in her lap, she glimpsed the future in which the pair would do this routine a thousand times over with Likins devouring a book and the cat sleeping soundly below.
“I’m not just in a kitten craze,” Likins recalled thinking to herself. “This is my cat.”
It’s that kind of moment Jena Carr, 39, had dreamed of when she and her husband, Matt, 40, opened Cool Cat Collective last year.
Former Washington, D.C., restaurateurs, the Carrs moved to Long Beach in 2022 to be closer to Jena Carr’s family. Once they settled in, Carr threw herself into kitten rescue, a longtime interest. She started as a foster owner and kitten rescue volunteer before assisting TippedEars with its work tracking and capturing cats in Compton.
“Once you start realizing the extent of the cat overpopulation problem, you quickly realize that we can’t foster or adopt our way out of it,” Carr said, calling TNR “the solution that gets to the root of the problem.”
One day during peak kitten season, Carr was out with TippedEars co-founder Renae Woith when she was struck by the number of sick and injured cats on the streets and the challenges of understaffed rescues working to home them.
“It kind of got her wheels working, like, ‘What can I do as a business?’” Woith said.
Almost a year later, Cool Cat Collective was born.
It was still warm outside on an early September evening as the last of the daytime visitors left the cat boutique. Once they were gone, Carr made her final touches for the night’s silent reading party: laying cushions in store corners and scattering toy mice across the floor.
In the catio, Poolboy, a domestic shorthair, licked a Churu treat from a visiting reader’s hand. When he and his siblings — all named after blue-collar jobs — arrived in late July, they were timid. But at this silent reading party, they bounded about the room, crawling on attendees’ laps between wrestling matches.
“It makes me so happy when the shy ones become social,” Carr said.
A sign hanging outside the catio tallied good news: 93 adoptions since July 2024. TippedEars co-founder Vita Manzoli said that’s about double the numbers the rescue used to see before the boutique opened.
TippedEars’ partnership with Cool Cat Collective has been a boon for the nonprofit, which receives 100% of the proceeds from the cat boutique’s “First Thursday” silent reading parties and “Third Thursday” doodle nights, which both cost $15 to attend. But it’s not only the financial support that has made a difference for TippedEars cats.
“We’ve gotten volunteers from them — donors, adopters, obviously, but the byproduct of that is really just educating people about the cat overpopulation crisis, what TNR is and how they can help,” Woith said.
Placing rescues at Cool Cat Collective, where they are comfortable and their personalities are on full display, has also allowed TippedEars to give them a better chance at being adopted.
“The cat they may not have looked twice at online, they now are the one [adopters are] taking home, because they actually got to meet them,” Woith said.
Carr has a spreadsheet of potential resident kittens always on her mind, so she’s eager to facilitate adoptions. But everyone is welcome at Cool Cat Collective, whether they’re looking to adopt or not.
“You don’t even have to be shopping,” Carr said. “That was part of our goal: to create a space with a really low barrier to access for people who are cat-curious or just need a little moment of cat joy in their day.”
Regan Rudman, a recent Long Beach transplant, can’t have a cat of her own for health reasons. Still, she visits Cool Cat Collective every month. She tried for three months to snag a ticket to the store’s silent reading night before she secured a spot for the September event.
“Getting to actually interact with cats in an environment that they feel comfortable in just makes my heart so happy,” Rudman said.
Rudman, who works at a publishing company, made an effort to focus on her book during the silent reading hour, but she also hoped her ruffled leg warmers would entice a curious kitten to come over.
Other attendees, lounging on cushions throughout the boutique, gazed down at their e-readers but peeked as cats bounced around like pinballs in their periphery.
Poolboy and sibling Chauffer, who would find their forever home together that weekend, were particularly rowdy. On the other hand, Bisque — from a litter Carr called “the Soups” — hid in a cardboard house for an hour before she finally stretched a paw out, like a jazz hand through the “front door.”
“There’s always some antic happening,” Carr said. “People are reading, but they also have one eye on the cats as they’re reading. I’d be curious asking people, like, how far into their book they actually get.”
Attendee Lien Nguyen, whose love for the kittens overrode her cat allergy, admitted she’d drop her book the second a cat came into her vicinity. But no matter how hard they tried, scarcely an attendee could successfully attract a kitten. The cats chose their company, not the other way around.
“It was like rejection therapy whenever they went away,” Nguyen said.
That’s why Likins was so touched when Soup Enhancements found her at the August silent reading party. She nearly burst into tears, she said.
Later that evening, she was moved even more when her boyfriend, Max Mineer, bonded with his feline soulmate, Handyman. Happily, Handyman happened to be the only cat Soup Enhancements tolerated.
Now, the two cats live together in Likins and Mineer’s Long Beach apartment. They sleep together, clean each other and, despite being from different litters, generally behave like siblings.
The day Likins brought the cats home, staffers at Cool Cat Collective and TippedEars gave her every resource imaginable, including a 20% off coupon for Chewy products and scratch post recommendations. And there was an easy out: If anything went wrong, the couple could bring the cats back, no questions asked.
“It really made me trust them more to know that they were thinking to the future about these cats,” Likins said. “It wasn’t just a process of making sure that a cat got a home. It was making sure that a cat got a life.”
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