End of Year Recap 2025 — and a Look Ahead to 2026

It’s that time of year again: the annual (and by now almost traditional) CatSwoppr End of Year Recap! A moment to pause and reflect on what we’ve achieved, especially in terms of what we’ve been able to give to cats and our global community of cat fans. It is also a moment to look ahead and share what we would like to attain next.

Since it’s impossible to list everything our team has noticed, experienced, and — most importantly — created for our digital cat community this year, I’m sharing a selection of key observations below. For now, our community of cats continues to live primarily on Instagram and, to a lesser extent, TikTok,while we await the launch of our cat app.

Goal Completion

At the end of 2024, we set the following goals for 2025:

• Making more cat friends, ideally by sharing more cat stories from Latin America and Africa

• Strengthening our existing cat tip/cat fact formats, reviving Cat of the Week/Month, and introducing brand new formats such as funny cat memes.

• Redesigning the website (www.catswoppr.io) based on our current visual templates, with improved UX/UI.

• Writing articles, both interview and non-interview-based, about non-profit cat organizations protecting big cats, such as the Javan Leopards by Wanicare Foundation.

Community Growth & Regional Stories

First and foremost, we’re happy to say that we’ve grown organically once again in follower numbers on both Instagram and TikTok. Thanks to our former team member, Érica (Brazil) and our current team member, Ana (Spain), we were able to tell more stories from Latin America, primarily including cats from Peru and Brazil.

If you know cats (or cat people!) in Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, or elsewhere in the region, please let us know. Gathering and sharing more cat stories from Africa remains a challenge, but it’s one we’re determined to take on in 2026.

Content Formats

This year, we continued, retired, and launched several social media formats. We decided to discontinue Cat of the Week/Month, while Cat Fact Tuesday has proven to be a true keeper, alongside Cat Memes on Fridays and Cat Spotting from streets around the world.

Our Cat Tips series has evolved into Cat Health Tips, thanks to the collaboration between our team member, Dila (Türkiye) and veterinary medicine student Nisa Sumertekin, who studies in Greece.

Visual Designs

The design baton was passed from former team member Meriç (Türkiye) to our team member Anastasiia (Russia), who is currently studying in Finland. Under her creative direction, we added a sixth color (purple) to the CatSwoppr color palette, bringing more visual variety to our feed.

Anastasiia also launched the Cat Stickers format: handmade digital cat stickers illustrated from Instagram photos. Catfluencers such as Snickers the Smiling Cat (USA) and Luce the Persian Cat (France) have already been immortalized as stickers!

Short-Form Storytelling Experiment

This year, team member Ana introduced the Cat’s Favorite series, which is currently on pause. The idea was to create a shorter, lighter version of our weekly Wednesday cat stories, without requiring full interview answers from our cat clients. Instead, clients would share brief preferences, such as favorite sleeping spots, toys, or food, which we’d then turn into playful reels.

Interestingly (and perhaps unsurprisingly), many cats — or rather, their humans — preferred sharing longer answers after all.

Website & Editorial Content

The planned website restyling didn’t happen this year. That said, it wasn’t a high priority: the cat stories remain easy to read, and storytelling continues to be the heart of the site.

We did, however, make progress on storytelling for non-profit cat organizations. We published a feature on the Scottish organization Saving Wildcats and their work protecting wildcats — the “Highland tigers” — in the Cairngorms National Park. 

Expanding the type of content that highlights non-profit organizations, which help big and/or small cats in need, remains a goal for 2026.

If you’re part of a non-profit cat organization and reading this: you’re very welcome. We’d love to create a free promotional campaign to highlight the work you do for big and/or small cats.

We’re especially proud of the week-long Instagram awareness campaign we ran for the Wanicare Foundation and its Javan Leopard program. Former team members Érica (Brazil), Adam (Indonesia), and Lana (Russia), together with current team member Tisha (India), now our blog editor, collaborated on this project, resulting in impactful content and a very positive response.

In 2026, we also hope to highlight more shelter cats and give them the attention they deserve.

App Progress

The CatScanR app (working title) is still very much in development. Our CTO Roman continues to work tirelessly on both the iOS and Android versions. We’ve now moved past the login stage using Google accounts and Apple IDs.

Additionally, Meriç (Türkiye) has been working hard in Figma to finalize our app’s color palette and several icons, which are now complete. We can’t wait to start implementing them into the app in the coming year.

For our Minimum Lovable Product, we’re focusing on core features:

• Creating detailed cat profiles

• Searching for and matching with like-minded cats (and humans)

• Finding cats via our CatScanR (Google) Maps

• Exchanging information and following cat-related news in a community feed

One of our goals was to create more videos explaining what the app can be used for. We’ll produce more of these once the feature set of the Minimum Lovable Product is finalized. So far, we’ve published a reel explaining how we differ from platforms like Cat-in-a-Flat / Rover (now owned by Blackstone – not per se cat lovers in core), as well as a reel showing how the app can help reunite people with their lost cats.

Some Successes

We’d also like to briefly highlight a few standout successes in terms of reel reach for our cat clients. Among them:

• A reel about Tyson, the cat of up-and-coming UK-based comedienne Veronika Mirgova, reaching 121K views

• A reel featuring the adoptive cats of German-Indonesian celebrity Laura Cinta Kiehl, reaching 110K views

• A reel spotlighting cat rescuer Chema from Cantabria, Spain, reaching 51.8K views

  
  

That said, views are not what matter most to us. What truly matters are the personal and unique messages each cat client shares — messages that inspire and delight fellow cat lovers. Whether it’s advocating for adoption, sharing tips on gentle cat walking adventures, or raising awareness about feline health issues, we remain committed to giving cats, cat parents, and caregivers a voice through our Global Cat PR Agency.

Outlook for 2026

Our goals for 2026 aren’t overly ambitious — but they are meaningful. We want to:

• Share more cat stories from Africa, the Middle East and Latin America

• Run at least one awareness campaign for a nonprofit cat organization

• Continue and further refine our existing social media formats

In March 2026, I’ll be spending a month in Indonesia. By then, we hope the app will be ready in a more presentable form, allowing me to do on-the-ground promotion within both the startup ecosystem and the local cat community in Indonesia.

Another highlight for 2026 will be a new live team event in Amsterdam. While we work fully remotely — with team members currently dialing in from Finland, India, Japan, Spain, Turkey, Vietnam, and before also from Indonesia, Lebanon, Portugal, Romania, Russia and South Africa — we came together in person for the first time in Amsterdam in November 2025. The day included lunch, a visit to the Kattenkabinet (cat museum), and dinner and drinks.

In 2026, we’re planning a live home-cooked dinner event in Amsterdam, where team members from Spain and Vietnam have already volunteered to cook dishes from their home countries.

Thank You, Dear Team

Last but not least, I want to thank everyone who contributed to CatSwoppr and the CatScanR app development this year. I’m equally grateful to our community followers and clients for trusting us with their stories and allowing us to share them through blogs and reels that inspire cat lovers around the world.

None of what we achieved in 2025 would have been possible without the collaboration of both current and former team members. Heartfelt thanks to former team members in 2025: Waka, Mara, Aura, Lana, Adam, Flavia, Diana, Meriç, Siobhàn, Charlie, Adnan, Érica, and Gülsima. In my view, cats and non-profit cat organizations everywhere have been better off thanks to your contributions.

A great deal of appreciation and love also goes out to our current team: Roman, Tisha, Ana, Ngoc, Anastasiia, Nhi, Lena, Pepper, and Dila. In 2026, we’ll continue working together to make the world a more welcoming place for cats.

On behalf of our entire team, thank you once again — and we wish you a purr-fect, feline-filled, and cat-tastic 2026!

suki

Founder, CatSwoppr & CatScanR