Appletreedeals

In 1982, Faline Jones of Wooster, Ohio was a part-time Secretary. She supplemented her income with some craft work – she made cloth covered doorstops in the shape of a cat, and called them the Cat’s Meow. Her “workshop” was her kitchen table.

One day, while visiting a gift shop that sold her Cat’s Meow doorstops, some tiny wooden houses in in the shop caught her eye, and she thought, “I can do better than that.” Using her sparse resources, she used $39 to buy several pieces of pine and went to work cutting out and painting a dozen two-dimensional miniature wooden houses.

She called her creations The Cat’s Meow Village, taking the name from her previous business venture making the cat-shaped fabric doorstops. “I didn’t want to throw away those business cards and letterheads,” says Jones, 47. Following on her feline theme, Jones stamped a black cat on the front of the 4-by-5-inch wooden architectural facades and peddled her creations to several area gift shops.

As business boomed, Jones expanded. In 1989, she built a 24,000-square-foot building just outside Wooster, which today has 70 employees. Although millions of products have been made, the company hasn’t lost its personal touch. Each piece travels through seven sets of hands that cut, screen-print and hand finish it.