We were lucky to catch up with Inga Carey recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Inga, thanks for joining us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

I’ve always loved cats; and it’s a love that my mom and I shared. When she passed away in 2020 I wanted to do something to honor her and do something good for my community. I began researching the idea of a cat cafe on Christmas of 2022, There were two at the time in Charlotte, but I saw the need for one in upstate South Carolina where you could avoid Charlotte traffic. I ended up visiting 54 cat cafes before opening mine to see the best practices of this unique concept. Searching for a location, going through the construction and permitting process took 18 months, but it was so worth it to see my vision of a cat cafe come to life. We opened May of 2024 to over 300 people visiting our cafe Memorial Day weekend! The cats are definitely spoiled while they are in our care and we love every one like our own; and even adopted Queen Verde to forever reign over the cat lounge in November of 2024. We gave her eight forever friends/royal subjects in the spring of 2025 when we decided to keep some Purrmanent Residents in the cat lounge in addition to our adoptable kitties. As of this writing we have adopted out 229 kitties! I’m so thankful for the partnerships we’ve made along the way to support our cafe side of the business too; Forte Legato Coffee Roasters provide our espresso beans and cold brew, Wild Flour Sweets for our gluten-free pastries, The Magic Box for their freeze dried candies and pickles, and various other small businesses and artists who create fantastic cat-themed merch for our boutique.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Purrfect Pair Cat Cafe is so much more than a place to watch cats and sip coffee.
Our Cafe has an expansive drink menu ranging from lattes, mochas, teas, matchas, lemonades, slushies, ciders, italian sodas, dirty sodas, and popping boba pearls. We have specialty drinks featured on our Cats Meow menu year-round, and feature a new themed menu each month. Our espresso is the highest quality around and roasted by Forte Legato Coffee Roasters. We partner with Wild Flour Sweets for amazing tasting cookies, rice krispies, macarons, and cake pops, which all happen to be gluten free. Our partnership with The Magic Box for their freeze dried candies has been super sweet as well. If you don’t want to go into the cat lounge you can grab a coffee and sit at our 20 foot window to watch the cats zoom around!
Our Boutique is filled with a large variety of items for cat loves and their cats! We have branded merch to rep your local cat cafe, stickers and keychains tend to be a top seller these days. If you can’t adopt a real cat we have several options of toy stuffed cats to love on. Your cat will love the springs, catnip kickers, and scratchers that we sell so your cat won’t be jealous of our cats they smell on you. We have a whole corner of items that local artists and small businesses have made that are cat-tastic too!
Our Cat Lounge is the star of the show with our nine Purrmanent Residents and rotation of Adoptable Cats from our current rescue partner Lancaster SPCA. We have adopted out 229 cats so far and love to help find the purrfect family for these fantastic felines. Customers can choose to visit with the cats for 30 minutes or an hour. We also offer a package for Private Parties for birthdays, get-togethers, team-building, bachelorette parties and more! We usually offer a Movie Night each Friday and host special events like bingo, trivia, and Cat Yoga each month.
While the cat lounge is not “BYOC; Bring Your Own Cat” we do have Luxury Cat Boarding Condos in a separate space. Family cats never interact with the cats in the lounge, but have their own space to play, watch cat TV, nap, and snack on their favorite foods from home. Owners receive a picture or video of their kitties every day while they are away and if their cat was adopted from the cat lounge, we offer a discount to alumni!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

The cats make it look easy, but I would have never guessed how much work it truly is to open your own business. My mom always said that each problem is just a hoop you have to jump through, but these hoops are on fire and never-ending. Each week presents an entirely new problem to solve, and the most challenging thing seems to be how we can increase sales and profit, and how I can budget my time better. I don’t have a business or finance degree, in fact my formal training was at Winthrop University for my Masters of Music Education. And I feel like I’m constantly living two lives with not enough time because I’m still teaching music full time at an Elementary in Rock Hill. I have hired a great staff who keep the place in great shape while I’m at my day job. We work well together to create a positive and creative environment for every customer who walks in our doors. We could always use more foot traffic and we are exploring new and creative ways to get the word out there that there’s an awesome cat cafe right in Rock Hill.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I started working on our social media accounts before we even had a location picked out. I was able to use social media to create a lot of buzz in our community and initiated support for the project. I shared the page in local groups I thought would be interested, but I also went to a lot of community events and promoted people to join our page for updates on our progress. At the events we would have a QR code that was super easy to scan for them to join our page, and we would have a raffle for those who joined to win a prize.
Once we opened we encouraged everyone to share and tag us if they post photos so we could expand our reach. Posting our own reels and videos and lives increased out audience and reach as well. We created a loose schedule of posting each day, Mondays feature merch, Tuesdays feature our events, Wednesday is a “Who’s New” for the adoptable cats, Thursdays feature a specialty drink, Fridays we post a photo dumb that our staff has taken throughout the week, Saturdays I go live for “Caturdays” and we feature a cat, and Sundays we post who’s been adopted that week.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.purrfectpaircatcafe.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/purrfectpaircatcafe
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/purrfectpaircatcafe/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@PurrfectPairCatCafe
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@purrfectpaircatcafe

Image Credits

Inga Carey and Victoria Coglianese