Boo was hanging out on Leaf Tree’s upper Leafs and grabbed his owner’s hand for a gentle finger nibble — thankfully it wasn’t too tasty!

You can see that the Leaf he’s standing on (a Mk1 Leaf), has a improvised cardboard shim between the toe of the cleat assembly and the Trunk. Over time, we found that the sisal was shifting and compressing enough to allow the cleats to droop slightly.

On subsequent iterations, and certainly for our final manufacturing process, we will be incorporating rope stretching into our manufacturing process and determining the perfect position of the Heels and Toes to ensure the long-term compatibility of the Leafs and the Trunk.

With enough time, however, the wrapped sisal may still eventually wear down from scratching and the repositioning of the Leafs. This is an issue with any cat trees that are commonly available (unless they decided to glue the rope to the column, which is a sad waste of what would have been easily reusable/recyclable materials), and we want to address this aspect of the Leaf Tree’s life cycle by exploring the feasibility of sending replacement rope for the user to replace by hand, or (more realistically) establishing a trade-in program that gives Leaf Tree owners a discount on their replacement part(s) and the ability for Leaf Tree to reuse and recycle the components of any used part!