I grew up in a house full of cats. My parents currently have eight of them — all exotics, most of them born during lockdown when my parents discovered that breeding cats was a reasonable thing to do with two years of unexpected free time. Whatever the origin story, the result is the same: I have never not known what it's like to share a house with animals that have strong opinions about furniture.
So I know what a cat scratcher tower looks like when it's been properly used. I know the particular state of a post that's been scratched daily for six months — the fraying, the compression, the felt ripped back to the board beneath it, the sisal shedding in long strands, the little carpeted stairway shelves that seemed solid enough until a ten-kilogram cat launched off the top one too many times. I've seen it more times than I can count. In a house with eight cats, scratchers don't last long.
What I hadn't stopped to think about — until one visit home a couple of years ago — was where they went afterwards.
I noticed a new floor-to-ceiling cat tower in the corner of the living room. It was a big one, the kind that takes two people to assemble and a deep breath before you check the price tag. I asked what had happened to the old one.
"It went in the bin. It was just easier to replace it."
That should have been an unremarkable answer. It wasn't. The old tower had been in a state — sisal worn through, felt shredded, a couple of the platforms structurally compromised from months of use by eight cats who treated it like a motorway junction. I understood why it had gone. What I couldn't shake was the frame. The base. The central post that had never moved, never cracked, never shown any sign that it was anything other than perfectly functional. All of it, in a skip, because the surfaces around it had given out.
I work in sustainability. I spend my days looking at materials, at lifecycles, at what things are actually made of and where they go when people are finished with them. I've done it professionally for years. And standing in my parents' living room, I felt the particular frustration of someone who can see a problem clearly and can't find anyone who has bothered to solve it.
So I went looking. Not a quick browse — the kind of research you do when something has genuinely lodged in your head. There wasn't much out there. A few refillable products that were poorly made. A few premium options that looked better but were still fundamentally disposable once the surface wore down. A lot of "natural" and "eco" labelling that didn't hold up to five minutes of scrutiny. Nobody had built something around the one insight that seemed obvious once you saw it: the post doesn't wear out. Only the surface does. So why is anyone replacing the post?
Culm is my answer to that question. A solid bamboo post, built to last. A natural jute sleeve — the part your cat actually uses — designed to be replaced when it's worn, without touching anything else. The post stays. The sleeve goes, to compost or back to us via a returns programme when we're big enough to run one properly. Buy it once. Refresh it when you need to.
The prototypes are here. The testing is real. Right now, Culm is being assessed with the rigorous indifference that only cats can bring to something built specifically for them — more on that below.