How to Build Cat Condos and Sell Them
By Eric Hammer
If you love working with wood and power tools, then one of
the best things you can do is to learn how to build cat condos.
Cat condos are basically a type of furniture that your cat (or
hopefully, someone else’s cat, after you sell one to them)
can crawl into and around and climb on top of.
Building cat condos isn’t a particularly hard job to
do. The key thing here is that you want to make them both sturdy
and decorative. If all you do is build something from raw, untreated
wood for example, you’ll end up with something appropriate
to keep in your basement and that your cat may really enjoy hanging
out in but which ultimately will not be a particularly salable
piece of furniture.
Of course, even once you manage to build the cat condos and
get them to look like professional quality, handmade furniture;
you still need to find places to sell them. After all, you can’t
exactly stand around the parking lot at PetCo offering your alternative
to their industrially made cat condos. Fortunately however, there
are plenty of places to sell them.
Once you learn how to build cat condos, you can sell them
at flea markets, on eBay or Craigslist and at specialty cat shows.
If you make quite a few of them, you can even offer them on consignment
to local pet shops who can sell them for you and take a commission
on the sales.
How Much Can You Make?
It’s really hard to quantify how much you can make once
you learn how to build cat condos that are worth selling. There
are a great many elements that go into the equation – how
complex is the cat condo you built, how ornate is it? Are you
selling through eBay or Craigslist or through a flea market or
a private store (you’ll likely make more selling at flea
markets or private stores). However, to give you some idea of
the numbers you can hope to achieve, very basic cat condos sell
for around $40-$50 while extremely complex and ornate cat condos
can easily sell for hundreds of dollars (we saw one for $850
with multiple levels and four separate cat condos built into
the same unit).
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Don’t forget that once you are in the business of selling
cat condos, you can also learn how to make other cat furniture,
such as toys, beds and perches. If you can master how to make
cat condos, then mastering how to make all these other types
of furniture is actually not very difficult to do at all.
Keep in mind when building cat condos for sale that you have
two markets. One the one hand, you are selling something for
cats to climb around on and into. Therefore, what you build must
be comfortable for cats. At the same time, the other market you
are selling to is the owners. While they want their feline friends
to feel comfortable, they also want something they wouldn’t
mind putting in their homes as a piece of furniture, therefore
you need to make the cat condos look attractive as well as cat
friendly.
Qualifications / Requirements
There are no real requirements to make or sell cat condos
except that you need to know how to use power tools to build
them. When you go out to sell the cat condos, there are also
no special requirements except a head for business to know how
to sell these things.
First Steps
Start by building a cat condo for your own feline friend or
for that of a neighbor or friend. See how it comes out. Then,
build a few more and offer them to friends and family who own
cats. Once you know how to build cat condos and you are confident
in your craft, you can start selling them on eBay or Craigslist
and then move on to selling them via pet stores on consignment
and in flea markets.
Resources
New
Woodworker: Kitty Condo – This is one of the more elaborate
plans we’ve seen for building cat condos.
Tool Crib: 21 Free Cat Furniture Plans –
This blog has 21 different ideas for cat furniture and includes
a helpful explanation of how to build cat condos.
Playtime Workshop – Purely for inspiration,
here is an awesome looking cat condo. While they don’t give
the plans for how to build one, it should set your imagination
moving in the right direction.
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