Week 30: Running London's most coveted cat cafe | Lauren Pears, Lady Dinah's Cat Emporium

9 to when?

Show notes

Lauren Pears is the proud owner of Lady Dinah's cat Emporium – an Alice in Wonderland themed cat cafe based in Bethnal Green, London. They currently have 16 cats and an enormous waiting list for weekend visits.

Starting out

- Lady Dinah’s has been running for around six years. The first two years were stressful!

- When starting out, Lauren faced a lot of challenges. One of these was a disconnect between herself and investors

- Lauren also underestimated the hype – when she opened her booking system in 2013, she received over 20,000 bookings within the first seven days

- The flip side of this was that people were forgetting about their bookings, and while it was booked out according to the online system, Lauren had an empty cafe

- No shows are a massive problem, and as a result Lauren now requires customers to purchase their ticket upfront

- Along with the usual cafe staff, Lady Dinah’s have cat carers who are trained to look after the cats while customers are enjoying their time

Interior design - Alice in Wonderland

- Lady Dinah’s is named after Alice’s cat in Lewis Carroll’s famous book, ‘Alice in Wonderland’

- Upstairs, the cafe is themed as the Mad Hatter’s tea room. It features a giant top hat that the cats like to walk around, and rope bridges connected to the walls

- Lauren learned quickly that cats destroy everything, so anything you build has to be cat-proof

- Her creative team have helped her build the interior, including turning a structural column into a hand-sculpted tree

Social media

- Lady Dinah’s have a strong digital following on social media, with over 250,000 followers across various platforms

- Marketing has been an 'unsolvable problem' for Lauren since she first opened the cafe

- Lauren has found it hard to get someone who isn’t regularly in the cafe to do marketing for her, so for a long time did it herself

- In order to free up a little bit of her time she has had to learn to delegate social roles

Negative customers

- Lauren has inevitably had to deal with customers who don’t know how to interact with the animals properly

- She believes it’s essential that as a business owner you stick up for your staff

- Negative reviews on Trip Advisor are hard to navigate, and are frustrating when a customer’s account doesn’t align with the truth or is unfair

- For small businesses, negative reviews can be really damaging

- Ultimately, there is a bigger margin for failure as cats are unpredictable – some customers are more understanding than others

From video games to cats

- Before starting Lady Dinah’s, Lauren was working in the game industry

- After a number of different jobs working on some exciting games, the 2008 economic collapse meant that Australia was no longer a cheap place to develop games

- After a brief break from the game industry, Lauren was drawn back and made the leap to move to London where she worked at Sony Playstation for around two years

- Her time in the games industry means that she has been able to take on the techy / analytic side of Lady Dinah’s with relative ease

What’s one thing you wish you knew when you were first starting out?

- Don’t try and behave like a boss, the boss’ you’ve already had are the reason you left

- Be the boss that you want to work for

The big biz whiz quiz

Lauren scored 7/10