Our Story
Our Story
It started with the vomiting.
Not all at once. Cleo first, just once or twice a week. Then more
often. Then daily. Then more than daily. Shellie would be sitting
on the couch watching TV with the cats on either side of her, and
mid-episode, without warning — there it was. Again.
You learn the sound. You learn it the way a parent learns a
specific cry. You stop watching the show and start watching the
cat.
For a while she thought it was the food. So she changed the food.
Then she thought it was hairballs. Then she wondered if it was
something Cleo was getting into. Cora started a few weeks later,
quieter, less often, but starting. By the second month it wasn't
a one-cat problem. It was both cats. And it was slowly, steadily
getting worse.
That was when she booked the vet.
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"There's nothing wrong with them medically."
Bloodwork. Ultrasound. Stool sample. A prescription diet neither
cat would eat. A second visit, more bloodwork. Nothing.
The vet finally sat her down and said the thing she didn't
expect:
"There's nothing wrong with them medically. This is stress."
Shellie sat in her car in the parking lot trying to figure out
how that was possible. Her cats had food, water, toys, a window,
each other. They had everything.
Except they were also two cats in a small townhome in Fort Collins,
Colorado, living right off a busy road. The cars never really
stopped. Headlights swept the living room wall every few minutes
after dark. Stray cats and the occasional wild one would pass
through the backyard, and Cleo and Cora would press themselves
against the glass and stare, tails twitching, for hours. The
kitchen light stayed on past dusk. The TV played in the next
room. There were two cats and only enough square footage for them
to really be in one place at a time.
It wasn't a bad life. They had toys, sun spots, a window with a
view, each other. But cats weren't built for this — for living
indoors, in a small space, in constant low-grade stimulation, in
a house pressed up against a road that never went quiet. They
were built to roam. Cleo and Cora couldn't.
So they hid. Under the couch, behind the bed, in the back corner
of the closet. Cora barely came out for dinner some weeks. Cleo
groomed the same spot on her side until the fur thinned. And
both of them, almost every day, kept vomiting.
Stress wasn't a personality flaw. It was a load. And the load had
crossed a threshold their bodies couldn't carry anymore.
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The aisle of failures.
Shellie did what most of us do next. She went to the supplement
aisle.
She tried Composure first, because her vet's tech mentioned it.
Cleo sniffed the chew, walked away, and never came back to it.
The bag is still in Shellie's pantry. (She kept it as a reminder.)
She tried Zylkene. The capsules were impossible — open the
capsule, sprinkle the powder, watch your cat smell it and refuse
the entire meal. She tried mixing it into tuna water. Tuna water
refused.
She tried Zesty Paws. The smell from the bag made her gag from
across the kitchen, and her cats agreed.
She tried Bach's Rescue Remedy drops. Drops! Finally a format
that made sense. Except she couldn't tell if it was doing
anything, and the bottle ran out, and she didn't buy another.
She went back to her vet, embarrassed, asking what was next.
The vet handed her a prescription for fluoxetine.
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The week she pulled Cleo off the Prozac.
Shellie isn't anti-medication. She'd give her cats whatever they
needed. She started Cleo on the lowest dose, watched, waited.
The vomiting did stop. So did almost everything else.
Cleo's pupils were dilated all day. She hid further under the
couch than she ever had. She stopped greeting Shellie at the
door. She stopped chasing the laser pointer. She wasn't anxious
anymore, because she wasn't really *present* anymore.
Shellie pulled her off it after a week.
That was the night she stopped trusting the aisle, stopped
trusting her vet's first instinct, and started looking for
someone who would actually help her think this through.
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Finding Dr. Demitro.
Shellie didn't want another general practitioner. She wanted
someone whose practice was built around cats specifically —
someone who would treat feline stress as the real, mechanism-
driven problem it is, not as a single Prozac-shaped solution.
She found Dr. Patricia Demitro in Fort Collins. Twelve years of
clinical practice. Specialty in feline health. The kind of vet
who reads the journals and reads them critically.
The first conversation was supposed to be a consult. It turned
into five months of reading.
What Shellie and Dr. Demitro kept finding, across veterinary
journals, nutritional research, and the back-end data from
existing calming products, was that the cat-calming category had
a structural problem.
Every product on the market targeted one mechanism. L-theanine
alone. Or alpha-casozepine alone. Or pheromones, alone.
But chronic indoor stress doesn't come from one mechanism. It
comes from a nervous system that's been running hot on multiple
pathways at once — disrupted sleep cycle from artificial light,
chronically elevated cortisol from low-grade environmental load,
unbalanced neurotransmitters, an overstimulated GABA system that
never gets the chance to settle.
A single-lever product was always going to half-work. To actually
move the needle for a cat like Cleo or Cora, you needed four
levers, calibrated to work together, at doses safe for daily use
in cats.
Shellie and Dr. Demitro formulated it together. Melatonin for the
sleep cycle. Ashwagandha for cortisol. L-theanine for
neurotransmitter balance. Valerian for the GABA pathway. In a
flavorless oil dropper, because every chew the cats had refused
was sitting in Shellie's pantry as evidence.
Cleo and Cora were the trial.
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The night she knew it was working.
Three weeks in, Shellie was on her couch reading. Cleo jumped up
next to her, settled in, started purring — for the first time in
months without the restless half-purr-half-twitch that had become
her new normal.
Cora was at the other end of the couch, fully relaxed, not
hiding, not pacing. A car went by on the road outside. Neither
cat flinched.
And neither of them had vomited in eight days.
By the third week the over-grooming had eased. Cleo's bald spot
was starting to fill in. Cora was coming out for dinner the
moment she heard the can opener.
These were her cats. The cats she'd had before everything got
overloaded. They were back.
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Why Kitly exists.
Shellie didn't set out to build a brand. She set out to fix her
cats. The brand started because friends asked for some, and then
friends of friends asked, and then she realized that the same
combination that had worked for Cleo and Cora was working for
cats whose stories sounded almost identical to hers.
The aisle full of half-working products. The vet who reached for
Prozac too quickly. The chews the cats refused. The small house
on a busy road. The cat staring out the window at a life she
couldn't have.
The frustration of being a good cat parent with no good options.
Kitly exists because that gap shouldn't exist anymore.
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The promises we'll keep.
Three things we will not do, ever:
1. We will not reformulate Kitly Calm. The bottle on your shelf
today will be the bottle you can reorder in 2030. Composure's
reformulation broke our trust along with thousands of other
customers'. We won't repeat that.
2. We will not launch flavors. The flavorless oil base is the
point. Flavors are how chews fail. Kitly Calm will stay
flavorless.
3. We will not oversell what's in the bottle. Kitly Calm is not
a cure. It is not a sedative. It is a calibrated, four-part
nightly stack for chronic indoor anxiety. It works for most
cats it's built for. For the ones it doesn't work for, the
90-Day Guarantee covers you.
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The team.
Shellie — Founder, formulator, Cleo and Cora's person. Based in
Fort Collins, Colorado.
Dr. Patricia Demitro, DVM — Veterinary advisor and co-formulator.
Twelve years of clinical practice, specialty in feline health.
Based in Fort Collins. Dr. Demitro reviewed and approved every
ingredient, every dose, and every safety claim on the Kitly Calm
label.
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If you have a Cleo or a Cora at home.
We built this for them.
Or write to us first. We'd love to hear about your cat:
support@kitlypet.com
— Shellie