History of Alyo Inc.
Alyo Co., Ltd.
At the time, in mid-October 2017, our company had just been founded.
I rented a room in an old apartment and worked there to handle shipping and orders. That day, I worked with my staff until late into the night.
I had noticed the kitten's noises since midday, but at first I didn't pay much attention to it because it also sounded like the mother cat's voice.
However, after about six hours, the mother cat's voice disappeared, and before I knew it, the sound of the thin kitten's meowing had returned to normal. If the kitten was living with the cat without any problems, wouldn't it be strange for it to meow for so long that it seemed like a natural enemy...? With that thought in mind, I went to the apartment building where my office is located and searched for it. I found a small kitten lying in a ditch under the junkyard.
The ditch was 180cm deep, and since I and my staff did not think we could rescue the kitten by ourselves, we contacted the fire department. The firefighters who came quickly removed the rubbish and the lid from the ditch and rescued the kitten from the ditch.
The calico kitten that was hurriedly brought from the office and placed in a cardboard box was only four weeks old. Luckily, it only caught a cat flu, but considering that it had been cold for days... if we hadn't noticed it that day, the kitten would have ended up lonely and living in the ditch.
Thus, the little kitten who kept crying for more than six hours ended up coming to our house. Four years later, the kitten has grown into a huge cat weighing 5kg. Now, he has a new black cat brother that we adopted from a cat shelter cafe, and they live happily together.
If I hadn't started a company, if I hadn't chosen that apartment, I probably wouldn't have met these two cats. And in the four years since we welcomed the kittens, our company has grown steadily, and we've been able to move our office from our old apartment to an office in Aoyama. You could say that those four years have been a time of running with cats.
As a social contribution that is now possible now that our company has grown in size, we recently held a charity sale to support research into feline kidney disease treatment by Professor Toru Miyazaki of the University of Tokyo.
Cats are creatures whose kidneys start to deteriorate from the moment they are born, and eventually develop renal failure. I would be happy if more people could learn about research into treating feline kidney disease.
(As of the end of August 2020)
Through the charity sale, we were able to donate 1,010,200 yen to the University of Tokyo Foundation. As a company that has been working with cats, we hope for a future where cats can live longer and more peacefully.