Cat cafes serve a fresh brew

MID-CAREER blues. The lure of self-employment and a social conscience. Cats. Add them together and you have a potent combination that is fuelling one of the quirkiest lifestyle trends in Singapore today - the proliferation of pet cafes.

As trends go, this is not unique to Singapore. Pet cafes - where people pay a fee to play with the cafe's free-roaming pets - are catching on around the world. It originated in Taiwan in 1998, and has since spread to countries such as Japan, Korea, London, Paris, Melbourne and Berlin.

In Singapore, what started as a cutesy one-off novelty has grown legs - or paws - in less than a year. There are now at least five cat cafes - and one dog-centric one - in Singapore, and surprisingly, they're all started by mid-career professionals who quit the corporate race.