Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In September 2012, a man visiting his sister in Arizona took a picture of her cat and put it on Reddit. The cat was five months old, had a white face, a heavy underbite and a scowl that looked like she had just been handed a parking ticket.
The post went to the front page within hours. Then came the accusations: people were sure the face had been edited, so the family filmed a video of the cat looking exactly the same in motion. Her name was Tardar Sauce. The internet decided to call her Grumpy Cat, and that was that.
What happened over the next seven years is the part worth paying attention to, because it was the first time anyone really tried to run a meme like a business. By 2018, a cat from Morristown, Arizona had a manager, a wax figure, a movie and a jury verdict in a federal courthouse in California.
The frown was medical, not an act
The scowl came from feline dwarfism and an underbite, a combination that gave her a small body, slightly wobbly back legs and a face permanently set to unimpressed. She was not in pain and she was not grumpy in temperament. By every account from the people who handled her, she was a quiet, fairly patient cat who put up with a lot of cameras.
That gap between the face and the animal is the whole joke, and it is also why the pictures never wore out. A cat that actually looked furious would have been uncomfortable to look at. This one just looked like she had read your email and was not going to reply.
From Reddit to a meme manager
Within weeks of the Reddit post the photos were everywhere, and the family did something most people in that position do not do: they got representation. Ben Lashes, who had already managed Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat, took her on as a client. His whole pitch was that a meme is intellectual property and should be treated like one, with licensing deals, trademarks and a say in how the image gets used.
So instead of the usual arc, where a viral image gets copied until it means nothing and the owner gets nothing, Grumpy Cat got a brand. There were books, including a 2013 title that landed on the New York Times bestseller list. There was a line of merchandise. There was an appearance at SXSW in 2013 with a queue around the block, a slot as a Friskies spokescat, a Lifetime Christmas film in 2014 with Aubrey Plaza voicing the cat's inner monologue, and a wax figure at Madame Tussauds.
I remember the SXSW photos being the moment it tipped from internet thing into industry thing. A lot of marketing people looked at that queue and quietly decided memes were a media category.
The coffee drink that ended up in court
The licensing deal that made the news was not a book or a toy. It was coffee.
In 2013 the owners licensed the image to a beverage company for an iced drink called the Grumppuccino. The relationship soured over what the company was allowed to put the cat on. The owners' company, Grumpy Cat Limited, argued the licence covered the one iced coffee product and nothing else; the beverage company sold additional products and countersued.
The case went to a jury in federal court in Santa Ana, California, and in January 2018 the jury found for Grumpy Cat Limited, awarding $710,000 for copyright and trademark infringement. Reporters had a lot of fun with the headline, and fair enough, but the ruling mattered beyond the joke. A court had put a price on the unauthorised use of a meme character, the same way it would for any cartoon mascot.
The money was real, the hundred million was not
At the height of all this, a British newspaper reported that the cat had earned around $100 million. The number travelled fast and the family publicly denied it, saying it was nowhere near accurate. Nobody has ever published audited figures, and I would treat any specific total you see quoted as guesswork.
What is clear is that the earnings were enough to change the family's circumstances. Tabatha Bundesen, who owned the cat, left her job as a waitress within months of the first wave of attention to manage the workload. That is a more honest measure of what a meme was worth in 2013 than any headline number: one viral photograph replaced a salary, and then some.
What she left behind
Grumpy Cat died on 14 May 2019 at the age of seven, from complications of a urinary tract infection. The announcement went out on her own social accounts a few days later and got a genuinely large wave of mourning, including from people who would have told you they did not care about a cat meme.
The business model she accidentally invented is now standard. When an animal or an unwitting human goes viral today, the manager call usually comes within the week, and the trademark filing is not far behind. You can draw a reasonably straight line from that 2012 Reddit post to every pet account with a merchandise link in the bio.
Her social accounts are still up, still posting the odd anniversary image, and the old photos still circulate every time somebody needs to express disapproval without typing anything. Seven years after her death, the frown is doing fine.
Enjoyed this story?Get a new one every day on social.
