Anyone who has tried to buy a present for a cat lover knows the particular despair of it: aisle after aisle of near-identical “cat mom” mugs, novelty socks, and paw-print everything. It’s fine. It’s also forgettable. Then, usually with a small sigh of relief, you stumble onto Niaski, and the whole category suddenly looks lazy by comparison.
Niaski is the online shop of artist and illustrator Nia Gould, and it stands out because it isn’t really a cat shop pretending to be clever. It’s a genuinely clever art project that happens to run on cats.
The joke that makes it work
The heart of Niaski is a running gag that art-history nerds and cat people can both love: famous artists and their masterpieces, reimagined with cats. Salvador Catli. Frida Catlo. Clawed Monet. Pablo Picatso. Say them out loud and you get it instantly, which is exactly the point. The puns are the door; the craft is what makes you stay, because the illustrations are actually beautiful, not just captioned.
That sensibility runs through the whole catalog. Gould sells prints, sketchbooks, pencils, washi tape, tote bags, gift wrap, greeting cards, and colorful cat collars, the sort of things that are useful enough to buy for yourself and charming enough to give away. A “Clawed Monet” sketchbook or a “Pablo Picatso” collar lands very differently than a mass-produced mug.
She’s also written three books that extend the concept onto the shelf: A History of Art in 21 Cats, A Day at The Gallery, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cat, each one retelling the story of great art through a playful, feline lens. You can pick up A History of Art in 21 Cats on Amazon, and the full range of prints, collars, and other Niaski originals lives on her own shop at niaski.com and on Etsy.
From a home studio to the Tate gift shop
The backstory is a good one. Gould started blending her two loves, cats and art, back in 2015, working out of a home studio in Devon, in the UK, and grew what began as a tiny operation into a brand stocked worldwide. That trajectory is worth pausing on, because it’s the rare small-maker story that genuinely scaled without losing the plot.
Her books are now published in more than fifteen languages and turn up in gallery shops around the world. Her greeting cards, licensed through the Bristol-based studio USTUDIO, sit on the shelves of some seriously fitting retailers: Anthropologie, and the gift shops of Tate Britain, MoMA, and the National Portrait Gallery. There’s a lovely symmetry to a cat-art brand ending up for sale inside the very institutions it gently spoofs.
Who it’s for
Niaski is the answer to a specific gift-shopping problem: the cat person who also has taste. It’s for the friend with the Monet print in the hallway and the tabby on the windowsill, the one who’d actually use a beautiful sketchbook and roll their eyes at another slogan mug. It works as a small treat, a thoughtful present, or the collar you didn’t know you wanted your own cat to wear.
The prints, collars, books, and stationery on niaski.com are Gould’s own designs, sold direct, so if a particular piece catches your eye, her shop (or her Etsy storefront) is the place to find it. In a market crowded with interchangeable cat merch, that originality is the whole appeal. Niaski isn’t giving you a cat thing. It’s giving you a genuinely good piece of art that happens to purr.
