Uwant re-issued street cats under ancient poetic names

In Chinese, the everyday word for a native street cat — 土猫 (tu mao), roughly 'earthy cat' — carries the same flavour as calling a thing 'plain' or 'country' next to a pedigreed import: serviceable, familiar, unglamorous. Shelters and pet charities keep pushing adoption, but a rescue that cannot touch the label cannot fully lift the animal's standing. The barrier lived in language, not in the cats themselves.

Fighting the stigma head-on meant arguing '土 is fine', which rehearses the very dismissiveness it wants to undo. 友望 (Uwant), a pet-appliance brand, needed to change how the label itself is read.

On International Cat Day (8 August), Uwant held a '中国土猫大赏' (China's Native-Cat Grand Prize) that re-issued street cats under the formal poetic names ancient Chinese textiles and breed books once assigned by coat pattern — a tricolor became 滚地锦 ('Rolling Brocade'), a black-back white-belly 乌云盖雪 ('Dark Clouds Over Snow') — and presented them 'Grand Prize' trophies in the manner of a pedigree show, so the perceived value and adoptability of the cats shift without the animal changing at all.

Re-issued street cats under ancient poetic names like 滚地锦 and 乌云盖雪, with pedigree-style trophies, shifting perceived value without changing the cat.

The word '土猫' frames cats as plain, so adoption instinct never fires.

Ancient names like '滚地锦' place cats in a 'named treasure' frame.

Award-show trophies convert the name into social proof.

The move is additive language and ceremony, so perception shifts instantly and cheaply.

When a label devalues a product, find its forgotten formal or historical name and celebrate it with ceremony; the relabel repositions without changing the object.

The drive drew multi-outlet coverage (SocialBeta, 网易, 4A广告网) and Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu outdoor screens; no adoption or reach figures were published — the impact rests on the brand's own telling. Renaming is cheap, reusable and needs no product change; the pattern — restoring a stigmatised class's ancestral formal names and celebrating them with award-show ceremony — gives any pet, goods or category brand a repeatable frame, and it can be re-run on each adoption drive or festival.