Thank you all so much for the feedback that we received from your survey responses. Here at Cardboard Cat Homes, we believe highly in transparency and iterative improvement, and we want to share some of our survey learnings with you and let you know how they are influencing our decisions and priorities over the next few months.
Overall, we received 50 survey responses, which constitutes almost 10% of all of our customers over the past few months! We're extremely grateful that so many of you would take time out of your busy days to help us improve.
Let's start with some basics...
It turns out that most of you would describe your cats as "average" or "large" — We've got some well-fed cats jumping on our cardboard playhouses, and we'll definitely keep that in mind!
Looks like our marketing is working 😉 Thanks for connecting with us on social media!
Product quality & design were a big part of your decision to buy! We'll definitely keep investing here.
Many of you had nothing that you were disappointed in. Thank you! The rest of you were overwhelmingly disappointed with sturdiness; size & ease of assembly tied for second. Scroll to the bottom to see what actions we're taking to improve.
Designs are still topping the chart, but we loved to hear how much your cats love our products! Especially with cats being as notoriously picky as they are
This is definitely something for us to improve on!
You provided us with some great areas for improvement, and you gave us ideas for how to improve, too! Here's what we're going to do immediately (as in this week!):
Make our homes more durable
Cardboard quality: We've used a variety of different cardboard in the past, and it seems like which cardboard we use makes a big difference! Many of our cardboard issues arose from vendors selling us inconsistent cardboard grades, but we are currently partnering with much better local vendors. Moving forward we're going to discontinue using our inconsistent supplies that we still have in stock and stick only to the best stuff for your kitties.
Reinforced roof: We've experimented with reinforced platforms for our homes (two sheets of cardboard), and we've heard good reviews so far! We're going to make this the standard for all our homes.
Improved tabs: You may not know this, but your founder & CEO, Melanie, is an MIT graduate mechanical engineer! She's already got some creative ideas for a locking mechanism for the tabs to help with some of the "bowing out" problems you've told us about.
Improve assembly
Assembly labels: As many of you suggested, we could make our assembly easier by etching in labels to our pieces! We're going to do this in a way that doesn't detract from the design.
(We've also thought about creating assembly videos, but we know these take a lot of maintenance work. We would love to hear if you think that would be a big improvement, too! Let us know.)
Accommodate larger cats
Home attributes: We've already started to label our homes with some properties (like dimensions) to help owners understand which homes are best for their cats, depending on the size
Enlarge entryways: We're modifying all of our entryways to have as much room as possible to make sure your cats can fit!
New home: We're going to take a stab at designing a home especially for larger cats over the next month or so. Stay tuned!
Again, thank you so much for this incredible treasure trove of information. It really touches our hearts that so many of you would take the time over the holidays to provide this feedback, and we hope that you had an excellent holiday break & are looking forward to welcoming in the new year!
We intend to run a survey like this every few months to see how we're doing, but don't let that stop you from reaching out to us directly! You can contact Melanie (melanie@cardboardcathomes.com
Cheers,
Adam Zionts