Why we do the feeding ourselves
Handing the money to a charity would have been easier. We think it would also have been less honest.
The normal way this works
A brand in this category picks a rescue partner, sends them money, and prints the partnership on the site. It is a perfectly respectable model and it has one large advantage: the charity's reputation becomes yours, immediately, for free.
It has one disadvantage too. When a customer asks "what did my $2 actually do?", the honest answer is "it went into a general fund, and the charity spent it on something". That is fine. It is just not evidence.
What we do instead
We buy the food and we put it down. That means:
- The receipt is ours — a real amount, a real date, a real shop.
- The photographs are ours — of that food, in that place, on that day.
- If a month goes wrong, there is nobody to hide behind. It gets published as a miss.
That is the entire argument. It is a worse business decision and a better evidentiary one.
What it costs us to do it this way
We are slower. A partnership could have been announced in a week; building an operation takes longer, and our impact page stays at zero the whole time. We also carry the work ourselves, which does not scale the way writing a cheque does.
We think that is the right trade. A brand that can only show you a bank transfer is asking you to trust a third party. We would rather be the party you are judging.
What we are not claiming
We are not claiming to be better at cat welfare than an established rescue. We are almost certainly worse at it — they have vets, foster networks and decades of practice. If your goal is purely to move money to cats as efficiently as possible, donate to a rescue near you instead. We will keep saying that, because it is true.
What we are claiming is narrower: that if you were going to buy a bracelet anyway, this one comes with an accounting you can actually check.