Lori Harper didn't set out to start a cat product company. She just wanted to stop her cat from destroying a door frame.

On paper, her career has nothing to do with making pet products: fifteen years in retail management, a stretch of transitional jobs while working on a master’s degree, and a decade in human resources. But that background turned out to matter more than she thought. Working in retail she learned business and leadership basics and her years in HR where she supported manufacturing leaders gave her a working understanding of how products get developed, sourced, and made. When it came time to turn a cardboard-and-hot-glue prototype into something that could be built consistently and sold to strangers, those experiences made it all possible.

But it’s her cat parenting experience that really matters. She's had cats for most of her life — dozens of them, loved and lost and then loved again. She and her husband have always shared their home with no fewer than three cats at a time and right now that number sits at seven. Jack's Scratcher was designed by someone who's spent decades living with cats, watching and learning their behaviors, embracing the ones she could along the way.

Today, Lori runs Whisker's Widgets largely on her own — design, assembly, shipping, and everything in between — with steady support from her husband, an engineer, who’s quietly given his time and provided expertise every step of the way. She has more products planned for the future, but at its core, Whisker’s Widgets is just a company started by one cat parent who made something for her own home that turned out to be exactly what a lot of other cat parents needed too.