WHO IS WHISSTIX?
OUR STORY
THIS WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE A BUSINESS.
It wasn't supposed to be a product either. There was no business plan. No market research. No investors. No product-development meeting.
There was a pile of bamboo in somebody's garbage.
A Christmas wreath.
Some string.
A guy who grew up fly fishing.
And one Siamese cat who absolutely hated him.
This is how WHISSTIX started.
DORMONT, PENNSYLVANIA.
SUMMER, 2013.
It was a warm summer night in Dormont, a small neighborhood just outside Pittsburgh. My wife and I were walking the alleys looking for a little mischief.
We found some.
Sitting beside a neighbor's garbage was an enormous pile of freshly cut bamboo. Some pieces were small. Some were nearly twelve feet long. Some were almost two inches thick. Naturally, I decided I needed all of it.
Why?
I HAD ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA.
I told myself I was helping the garbage man, which is still my official position. So instead of leaving perfectly good bamboo beside somebody else's garbage like a normal person, my wife and I dragged an unreasonable amount of it home.
No project in mind. No purpose. No plan. Just bamboo. A lot of bamboo. And somehow, my wife allowed roughly thirty pieces of it to live in our spare bedroom, For the next six months.
Remember the bamboo.
We'll need it later.
BUT FIRST, WE NEED TO GO BACK.
Six months before the bamboo incident, my fiancée and I got married.
And like newly married people sometimes do, we made the next rational decision:
WE MOVED IN TOGETHER.
I'd heard marriage could be difficult.
What nobody warned me about was Roark.
DECEMBER, 2012.
LOOP
ROARK.
THE OTHER MAN IN MY MARRIAGE.
Roark was my wife's Siamese cat.
Beautiful cat.
Smart cat.
Very opinionated cat.
And Roark had already selected his person.
IT WASN'T ME.
He loved my wife.
Me?
Roark seemed to regard my presence somewhere between unnecessary and personally offensive.
My wife and I could be sitting peacefully on the couch watching television when Roark would suddenly launch himself from behind it, claw my arm, and disappear.
No argument.
No warning.
Just a drive-by reminder that he had reviewed the living arrangement—
and remained opposed.
This went on for months.
I tried existing peacefully with him.
Roark wasn't interested.
His attitude didn't really get worse.
It certainly didn't get better.
We simply occupied the same house under what could best be described as a tense diplomatic agreement.
My wife had a husband.
My wife had a cat.
THE HUSBAND AND THE CAT HAD ISSUES.
What would actually get my attention?
I DECIDED TO FIX IT.
What would I want to chase?
What would make something feel alive instead of like another dead toy lying on the floor?
And somewhere in that thought process, two completely unrelated parts of my life collided.
CATS.
AND FLY FISHING.
My work schedule at the time meant I was often home during the day.
Which left just two of us in the house.
Me.
And Roark.
Day after day.
Eventually I decided this couldn't continue.
I was going to connect with this cat.
I just had absolutely no idea how.
So I started thinking.
Not like a husband.
Not like a pet owner.
LIKE A CAT.
I GREW UP FLY FISHING.
I spent part of my childhood fly fishing in the wilderness of Fayette County, Pennsylvania.
And fly fishing teaches you something interesting.
You aren't simply putting food in front of a fish.
You're creating an illusion.
The weight matters.
The movement matters.
The presentation matters.
The d i s t a n c e matters.
The way the fly lands matters.
And perhaps most importantly—
IT HAS TO BE BELIEVABLE ENOUGH TO CHASE.
That's when I had the thought:
If I can outsmart a fish, surely I can outsmart a cat.
Whether a Siamese cat was actually smarter than a steelhead trout remained an open scientific question.
But I was willing to conduct the experiment.
I needed a rod.
A pole.
A stick.
Something long, lightweight and rigid enough to control movement from a distance.
And then I remembered.
THE BAMBOO.
SIX MONTHS LATER, THE GARBAGE BAMBOO HAD A PURPOSE.
I ran into the spare bedroom.
There it was.
My completely unjustifiable collection of bamboo had finally found its calling.
I started digging through the pile and found several pieces around half an inch wide.
I cut a few at different lengths.
Now I needed line.
String.
Yarn.
Something lightweight.
But there was a bigger question.
WHAT GOES ON THE END?
I already knew what I didn't want.
I had seen cat teasers before.
Short flexible rods.
Short strings.
And some bulky stuffed mouse or heavy object hanging from the end.
I'd used them.
They sucked.
The movement was wrong.
The proportions were wrong.
The thing at the end was too heavy.
It didn't move like something alive.
And looking at those toys through the principles I'd learned fly fishing, suddenly something became obvious to me:
THIS IS WHY CATS ARE BORED.
I would be too.
THEN I SAW THE WREATH.
Hanging on one of our doors was one of my wife's Christmas wreaths.
And decorating that wreath were feathers.
Light.
Airy.
Responsive.
Exactly what I needed.
I plucked one white feather from it.
Sorry, honey.
Now I had the bamboo.
I had the feather.
I needed one last thing.
STRING.
I searched the house.
Found some.
And suddenly this ridiculous experiment was becoming a real object.
36 INCHES.
60 INCHES.
ONE FEATHER.
I experimented with different bamboo lengths.
Different string lengths.
Nothing particularly scientific.
I was building it by feel.
The bamboo needed enough length to let me control the movement without standing directly over the cat.
The string needed enough distance to let the feather move independently of me.
Not six inches.
Not twelve.
Room to move.
Eventually I settled on a piece of bamboo approximately 36 inches long and ½ inch wide.
To it, I tied approximately 60 inches of string.
And at the very end:
ONE WHITE FEATHER.
That was it.
No motor.
No batteries.
No electronics.
No app.
No stuffed mouse.
No focus group.
BAMBOO. STRING. FEATHER.
The first WHISSTIK.
Although nobody knew to call it that yet.
ROARK KNEW SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING.
Cats know.
By this point, Roark had been following me around the house.
Watching.
Inspecting.
Waiting.
Whatever I was building—
he wanted to know about it.
The stage was set.
The cast had been selected.
There were two participants.
One extremely skeptical Siamese cat.
And one man who had just dismantled part of his wife's Christmas wreath to build experimental fishing equipment in the living room.
LIGHTS.
CAMERA.
ACTION.
I STARTED FLY FISHING IN MY LIVING ROOM.
That's essentially what happened.
I held the bamboo like a miniature fly rod.
I moved the feather across the floor.
Changed direction.
Stopped.
Pulled it away.
Made it dart.
Made it disappear.
Made it come alive.
And Roark—
LOST. HIS. MIND.
He chased it.
He stalked it.
He leaped.
He flipped.
He attacked.
He missed.
He recalculated.
He came back for more.
HE WAS HOOKED.
And somewhere in the middle of watching this cat absolutely lose himself chasing one white feather around my living room, something else happened.
I was having fun too.
This wasn't me giving a cat a toy and walking away.
We were playing together.
I controlled the movement.
He controlled the chaos.
For the first time, Roark and I weren't two creatures reluctantly sharing the same house.
WE WERE PLAYING THE SAME GAME.
IT TOOK LESS THAN TWO MINUTES.
Nearly a year of tension.
Avoidance.
Ambushes.
Clawed arms.
Mutual distrust.
And then—
TWO MINUTES.
That's approximately how long it took.
Roark stopped seeing me as the unwanted guy who had moved into his house.
I became the guy holding the thing.
And somehow, through that ridiculous piece of bamboo, string and one stolen feather—
WE BECAME FRIENDS.
Not eventually.
Not gradually.
Right then.
ACTUALLY, THERE WAS ONE PROBLEM.
Remember how Siamese cats tend to form incredibly strong attachments?
Well...
Roark didn't simply decide he liked me.
HE SWITCHED TEAMS.
Completely.
The cat who had spent months ambushing me from behind the couch suddenly became my cat.
He followed me.
Wanted my attention.
Wanted to play.
Wanted the WHISSTIK.
And in what can only be described as an extraordinary act of feline betrayal—
he began treating my wife suspiciously like he used to treat me.
I had wanted peace.
Apparently Roark preferred regime change.
ROARK WAS GONE.
MEET SANCHEZ.
The transformation was so complete that eventually, Roark didn't even feel like the right name anymore.
This was a different cat.
A different personality.
A different relationship.
A different household.
Roark had been dirty.
SANCHEZ WAS CLEAN.
So Roark became Sanchez.
And Sanchez became my buddy.
All because one afternoon I decided that if I couldn't convince a
Siamese cat to like me—
maybe I could build something he couldn't resist.
THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE END OF THE STORY.
There was no company.
There was no WHISSTIX logo.
No website.
No packaging.
No manufacturer.
No marketing strategy.
No plan to sell anything.
There was simply a homemade cat toy sitting in our house that worked ridiculously well.
So we kept using it.
And life moved on.
But the idea didn't.
Because once you've watched a cat interact with something this simple—
once you've seen the difference between giving an animal a toy and actually playing with them—
it's difficult to unsee it.
THAT'S WHISSTIX.
It was in 2013.
It still is today.
THE IDEA WAS NEVER THE STICK.
This is the part that matters.
WHISSTIX isn't really about bamboo.
It isn't really about string.
It isn't even about feathers.
Those are just materials.
WHISSTIX IS ABOUT THE SPACE BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR ANIMAL.
The moment when they're watching you.
You're watching them.
They think they know where it's going.
You change direction.
They freeze.
You stop.
They stalk.
You move.
They launch.
And suddenly you're both completely engaged in the same stupid little game.
WE DIDN'T INVENT THE CAT.
WE JUST STARTED LISTENING TO ONE.
Cats already know how to hunt.
How to stalk.
How to calculate.
How to wait.
How to chase.
How to pounce.
We didn't need to invent those instincts.
We needed to give them something worth using them on.
And maybe, along the way, give the person on the other end a reason to put the phone down and play too.
FROM ONE CAT.
TO YOURS.
WHISSTIX started with one difficult Siamese cat in a little house outside Pittsburgh.
One piece of bamboo rescued from somebody's garbage.
One length of string.
One feather stolen from a Christmas wreath.
And one guy who desperately wanted his wife's cat to stop attacking him.
There are more sophisticated origin stories.
There are certainly more impressive ones.
BUT THIS ONE IS OURS.
And thirteen years later, the basic idea hasn't changed.
Build something simple.
Make it move differently.
Let the cat do what cats were built to do.
And give the person holding the other end a reason to stay there.
FOR SANCHEZ.
The first cat to play with a WHISSTIK.
The first cat to prove it worked.
And the first cat to remind us that sometimes the smallest, dumbest-looking idea—
CAN COMPLETELY CHANGE A RELATIONSHIP.
He didn't know it at the time.
Neither did we.
But somewhere in that living room in Dormont, Pennsylvania—