Who Invented the Cat Dancer?

If you've owned a cat in the past twenty years, chances are you've owned a Cat Dancer. Even with its uber-simple design -- a three-foot length of wire with a few twisted-up rolls of kraft paper on each end -- cats go bananas for them, and cat lovers keep grabbing them off pet store shelves.

So who invented this marvelous, yet simple toy? That would be Jim Boelke. The proverbial light bulb that inspired the Cat Dancer went aglow over Boelke's noggin in 1978. Thirty years later, Boelke still runs Cat Dancer Products, Inc. out of Neenah, Wisconsin. Paw Nation spoke with Mr. Boelke to get the story behind his creative success.

What were you doing when you came up with the Cat Dancer?
I was going to college and working different jobs. One of them was in an animal shelter, and one of them was at a factory. The shelter was your typical county shelter in 1978. There was no such thing as a no-kill shelter. A pair of [cat] brothers came in that were so tiny. You could hold both of them in one hand. I couldn't take it. It's like, "No, you just can't kill these two; they're too cute." So I took them home, and of course my roommates were a little iffy on the whole idea.

They weren't cat people?
They were college students; they didn't need another expense or something else to worry about. I'm not sure I did either. [laughs]

But you couldn't help it.
I just couldn't. My other job was cleaning up at a factory, and part of what I did every night was to sweep the floors. Wire with some cardboard bits would fall on the floor. And one [piece of wire] kind of bounced around. I looked at it, then modified what I'd picked up, took it home, and doggone it if [those cats] didn't just go nuts over it! They would run after it like crazy. I'd never seen a cat get so excited about a toy. And neither had any of the other people that frequented our house. Pretty soon I was being asked to make them for everyone. "Jim, can you get some more of those?" Well yeah, they're garbage; I can bring you one. And one for your sister and your cousin and your brother-in-law and everybody else you can think of. All I had to do was use the snips and a pair of pliers and I could turn it into a nice toy.

So how did piecing together wire for friends turn into a business?
I finished going to college and felt like if I could find something appropriate, that I could make a go of a business on my own. A friend of mine said, "You ought to do that cat-toy thing." It had never really occurred to me. I started giving it some serious thought about what it would take. I started considering if my supply wasn't the wires on the floor. What if I actually had to buy them? How much would they cost? How much labor is there? How much packaging? I figured out some of those things. But we just couldn't come up with a really good name for it.

My brother at the time worked for Lenox, and was friends with the head of the marketing department. He said, "Jim, let me introduce you to this guy." I met the guy at a bar, and because it was me trying to get him to work freelance, I started buying him drinks. I bought as many as he could drink, but I kept getting from him that he just didn't have the time to take it on. I was disappointed, and [my brother] said, "Well, it was worth a shot." And I said, "Yeah, 20 or 30 bucks worth of White Russians; that's cheap consulting."

And at that moment, a hand landed on my shoulder, like somebody grabbing my shoulder as if they were about to fall over and needed to steady themselves. It was this marketing fellow. And he's smashed. He looks at me, and he puts his finger right up in my face and says, "Cat! Dancing!" And passes out on the floor. We put him in a cab and sent him home, and I kind of went, "You know, 'Cat Dancing' is wrong, but 'Cat Dancer' is great." And that's how we got the name.

How quickly did it take off?
It was slow. Prior to Cat Dancer, there was no such thing as an "interactive cat toy." I coined that term. I sent out samples on the assumption that you might throw away all the information, but you wouldn't necessarily throw away the toy until you showed it to a cat. And that worked to some degree. It took me nine years before I could start doing Cat Dancer full-time. I went to every major city I could find. I would look up pet-supplies distributors and send them a letter and a sample and say I was coming. It just started going from there.

In '92, we were blessed with an article in the New York Times. That really made all the difference. That got picked up by newspapers all over the country, and "interactive cat toys" became a category. Before Cat Dancer, all cat toys were something you threw on the floor and hoped your cat liked it! And you hoped you were around when he played with it, because that was cool to see. With Cat Dancer, the minute you bring it out, they get excited and they want to start playing. That was a totally unique experience for most people.

Do you have a certain design philosophy for the toys that you develop?
Well, it's not a pretty toy. Cats don't see color the way that we do. What they can see is the difference between light and dark. They need to see the contrast. People with carpet that's about the same color as kraft paper don't have as good an experience with the Cat Dancer as people with lighter or darker carpet, because it's harder for that cat to see that contrast.

When a cat is playing, it's honing its hunting skills. It's not just playing for the sake of playing. So the toys that are offered to a cat have to have some of the attributes of prey, or the cat won't be interested. But they're willing to substitute things for prey. And that's where I guess the art or the skill of making cat toys comes in: Can you make something that a cat will accept as a substitute?

You started making Cat Dancers by hand; how are they made now?
My partner [at the time], whose company actually made the decks of cards that were in the Trivial Pursuit games, was looking to diversify a bit, and was willing to develop a machine to make the Cat Dancers quickly and to handle the orders that I could generate while I was out on the road. He was an important step in the business in that I couldn't have gone out and been the salesman without having someone behind me that was making sure that orders and invoices and production were being taken care of. Since then we've expanded our product line a bit with some new products, and I'm doing R&D on some new things.

Tags: cat dancer, cat toys, CatDancer, CatToys, interview, invention, jim boelke, JimBoelke