Make your own Flat Cat!
In 1988 my brother Seth suggested we start a business together. I thought he was delusional for a bit. We were both living in Boston's South End. Seth was working in tech, and I was making lunches for fancy lawyers at a firm downtown. But we were ready to do our own entrepreneurial thing. After some soul searching and a research junket to Italy, Blue Q actually started off designing home lighting. But of course we got distracted, in only about about six months, by some weird hand of fate that seems to have dogged us ever since — The Flat Cat.
The Flat Cat was our first and only product, introduced at the New York Stationery Show in May of '88. We rented a 10x10-foot booth, and decorated it as a surreal living room to grab people's attention. Since we had no money, we just painted old chairs, a coat rack, broom, broken TV, and other junk bright yellow. The guerilla presentation was hard for store buyers to ignore, and sales at the trade show were quite decent. But during the approaching Christmas season we lucked out: Bloomingdale’s dramatically featured a hundred Flat Cats in their New York display windows. (And this was back when Bloomingdale's was Bloomingdale's.) Things took off from there, and soon Flat Cats were boogying out the door to distributors in Europe, Australia, and Japan.
And of course the whole thing was an accident; the first cat a lark, just a hasty decoration to keep us company. It came about when we saw a life-sized, double-page advertisement in Business Week, featuring a cat selling Canon copiers. We sliced it out, glued it to cardboard, and stapled an easel to it. It was a total piece of crap but had an irresistible faux pet vibe on the studio floor.
One day, in our strapped financial straits, the light bulb went off, and we thought it looked marketable if packaged strangely. So we sleuthed and purchased the cat image from professional photographer Manny Denner, a real mensch. Then, with a look in the yellow pages, we sourced a commercial printer, a die cutter, and a contract packaging company. Our whole supply chain was a bike ride away. Our initial run was 10,000 pieces. It seemed like a lot so we told shops we'd take them back if they tanked, but the phone started ringing with reorders almost immediately. We quit our jobs and bought a Canon fax machine!
And the name: Our dad, Ken, HATED cats, and groused with mock disgust when we told him what we were doing, “The only good cat is a flat cat!”
We named our company in a half-hour brainstorming session, on Seth's roof deck, on a sunny day under a blue sky. People ask us all the time, "What does the company name Blue Q mean?" The answer is nothing, we just liked the ring of it.
We ended up selling over a million Flat Cats for $5.99 in the shops, and Flat Fido and Instant Infant soon ensued. It was a wonderfully popular product line for about five years, and put Blue Q on the map, though it was almost two years until we hired our first employee. The last Flats shipped 25 years ago, but we hope you'll make your very own copy with this handy download. Just print, glue or tape to cardboard, cut out, and you're in business. Fashion a crude little stand-up easel for the back. If you print this in black and white, try tinting the eyes emerald green with a colored pencil.
Enjoy your new, authentic Flat Cat!
x
Mitch
