Every day of his retirement, Dad has been volunteering his time to make beds and toys for rescued cats…

After spending many years cultivating a profession, retiring for many individuals means finally being able to kick back and take it easy.

But business is really growing for Jaeshin Ha, who is 79 years old and who, together with his wife, retired in 2019 after owning and operating a men’s clothes store for the previous four decades.

His daughter Christina Ha shared a video on TikTok showcasing a typical day in the life of her father, Jaeshin, which went viral. Over the last three years, Jaeshin has been creating beds for rescued cats, and his commitment to his art was the subject of the film.

According to what Christina Ha said in an interview with The Dodo, “[My parents] were still in the process of figuring out what that retirement looked like when the pandemic started.” home the year 2020, shortly after Christina and her husband made the decision to move back home with her parents, she and her parents started making masks together.

Christina reflected, “It was a very interesting and stressful time, and we kept making masks for a few months,” as they continued to work on the project. After that, we discovered that we had a large amount of cloth, so we began brainstorming other ways in which we might use it.

Christina is not just one of the co-founders of Meow Parlor, which was New York City’s first cat café, but she is also the president of the nonprofit organization that is linked with Meow Parlor and is called Meow Parlour Cats, Inc. As a result, the idea of cat beds soon emerged, as was only logical.

 “I don’t remember how we ended up on cat beds, but I do remember how we ended up on cat beds.” “We began developing prototypes over the course of the summer, and by the time we got to October, I believe our feline friends had exhausted all of their testing options, and it was abundantly clear that one of them was superior to the others.”

Because Christina’s mother and father are “very detail-oriented” and because Jaeshin has very strong emotions about the quality of his work, Christina’s family went through around four different prototypes while designing the design for the ideal cat bed. Jaeshin has very strong feelings about the quality of his work.

Christina said, “My dad is very quiet, but he’s also very observant, so he noticed little things like whenever he would lay out a piece of fabric, a cat would come and sit in the middle of it.” “My dad is very quiet, but he’s also very observant.” “So right from the start, he had the idea that [the bed] should be level. The rest of what we did was geared at making the bed more inviting for the kitties.

In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the beds, the family gave prototypes of the beds to cat fosters and adopters. “We would also wash the beds to see how well they held up and would put them in various parts of the house to see if they would choose the bed,” Christina added. “This helped us determine how well the beds held up over time.” “We were fortunate that the original concept made sense, and all that needed to be done was to improve the quality and make sure that it was more durable so that it could withstand being washed multiple times.”

Additionally, Jaeshin and his wife are toy manufacturers. In the beginning, they began by stitching together toys in the form of things like starfish, ladybugs, turtles, and even kimbap, which is a traditional Korean rice roll. According to Ha, “from the very beginning, they had made a lot of shapes based on ocean themes, such as the seahorse and the shark, because my dad had this theory that cats love fish.” “I really doubt that cats have ever interacted with seahorses or clown fish, but I’m not here to correct my dad when he’s having fun,” the cat owner said. “I’m not here to correct him when he’s having fun.”

The family’s handcrafted beds may be purchased when they are available via WhisksToWhiskers.com, the website of Meow Parlour, and the brick-and-mortar café where the family runs the business. A percentage of the proceeds from the sale of each bed goes to the charitable organization that Meow Parlour supports, and another piece is given to Christina’s parents as a thank-you for all of their hard work.

Christina said that the cat beds provide her parents with a feeling of fulfillment at this stage of their lives.

However, the most essential thing that Jaeshin and his wife are doing is improving the lives of rescued cats all across the globe a little bit more comfortably.

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