Student's site the cat's meow

By Shannon Milliken
The Collegian

Fresno State student Mario Garza is a bestselling author with Chronicle Books, thanks to selling more than 40,000 copies of “Stuff On My Cat: The Book.”

The book was created based on Garza’s Web site, www.stuffonmycat.com.

Garza, a graphic design major at Fresno State, had noticed his cat getting lazier with age. He started to put random objects on her while she laid around, and Garza “got a big kick out of it.”

He looked at a message board online to see if more people were interested in putting things on their cats.

Garza was familiar with the layout and setup of a Web page from experience at school, so he began working on the launch of a Web site featuring pictures of stuff on cats.

The objects are never intended to hurt or offend the cat or the audience in anyway, but rather just as something funny.

Garza gets pictures of the cats submitted to him by mail, and he puts the funny ones up on the Internet. Garza has received more than 20,000 submissions.

In addition to creating the book through inspiration from the Web site, stuffonmycat.com has also spurred the launch of a desk calendar, a wall calendar, T-shirts and sweatshirts.

Garza actually has his own screen printing shop in the back of his new studio and all of the shirts and sweatshirts are printed in-house.

Prior to getting the studio, Garza and his friend Brent Marriott, distributed all the merchandise from Marriott’s house. However, they soon got to a point were there were too many orders to continue working from home.

“Last week we had 150 orders in one week,” Garza said. “That was a pretty good week.”

At stuffonmycat.com’s peak in September 2005, it was getting 140,000 hits a day, and it was rated in the top 100 blogs in the world. The site has been featured in People magazine’s holiday gift guide,was the Yahoo! “Site of the Day” and was nominated for a “Webby” award.

Stuffonmycat.com has become popular internationally as well. Garza gets pictures submitted from Brazil, Australia, Singapore and a lot from Britain.

“I would probably say we’ve gotten submissions from the majority of countries, definitely every continent,” Garza said.

Following the release of the book, fans began asking Garza to begin themed contests on the Web site. Garza began introducing new contests every couple of weeks and sending the winner a bunch of “Stuff on My Cat” goodies.

The contest going on right now is called “What movie am I?” and features cats dressed up after characters or titles of movies. Garza has received submissions for the movies “Titanic,” “Psycho,” “Wayne’s World,” “Napoleon Dynamite” and many more.

He gives everyone who visits the site a couple of days to vote.

Garza’s favorite in this contest is the “Titanic” cat. He admitted to voting for his contest, but he can only vote once. The site does not allow him any way to skew the ballots.

Garza does find stuff on cats hilarious but he doesn’t actually have a lot of cats.

“I’ve only had one cat my entire life and she’s still alive,” Garza said. “I’m just not a crazy cat guy.”

In addition to his more profitable work for stuffonmycat.com, Garza also does design work for bands.

He’s made shirts and album covers for POD, Trapped, Underoath and New Found Glory.

Since bands always want blood and gore, it is much different than work from stuffonmycat.com, Garza said.

He enjoys doing both, but keeps them entirely separate from each other.

Garza plans to launch www.stuffonmydog.com next year. He said getting the “.com” domain will be the toughest part of the new launch, but he has high hopes for what the new site will bring.

“It’s a user-driven site,” Garza said. “If people are just ‘whatever’ then it could crumble, but I think they’ll be really into it.”

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