Stroudsburg builder of cat houses hopes to win Super Bowl ad

A local cat house might find itself featured during the Super Bowl this winter.

That's right. The big game could star Stroudsburg's own Sammey's Cat Houses, a small, weekend-only business that makes and sells, well, let's just call them unusual cat abodes.

The winner of Intuit's contest gets a commercial during the Super Bowl paid for by Intuit Quickbooks.

It began when Intuit asked small businesses to tell them about their businesses.

"We believed that the stories we'd hear from small business owners like you would make our hearts beat faster and inspire us in ways we couldn't imagine," the company wrote.

So how does a tiny business operating out of The Weekend Bargains Flea Market in Stroudsburg catch the Quicken maker's attention?

They just told the story of Sammey.

"Our business started with the love of one rescue kitten. Sammey's mom was hit by a car and she was left abandoned," owners Lisa Baron and Wayne Glass wrote.

The pair adopted Sammey, short for Samantha, and built her a cat room. The room features unique cat trees with perches and one topped with a two-story log cabin "home."

Seeing how much Sammey enjoyed her playroom, the two decided to go into business building them for others. They specialize in building custom-designed cat trees, perches and rooms.

Each product is hand-made with logs and tree limbs from fallen trees. The business uses new carpet remnants that carpet stores would ordinarily throw out.

"You could say we're a green business," Beaver said.

The Intuit contest has four rounds. Round one was based on public voting through Intuit's contest site. The top 100 vote getters, including Sammey's, moved on to the second round. Those contestants now have to submit videos to further describe their business.

The top 20 vote getters during the second round go to the third round, where Intuit's staff will choose the top four. The grand prize winner will be chosen from those four again through a public vote.

The cost of a 30-second ad during the game is about $3.8 million, according to published reports. And that doesn't include production costs, which can also run in the millions.

Just ask Chrysler, which spent $12.4 million for a two-minute spot in 2011, the most expensive ever. That commercial featured rapper Eminem.

Intuit Quickbooks will cover production costs too, although don't expect to see Danica Patrick peddling cat trees.

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