FAQ: Where Did the Cat Come From? And Why Is He Named Gary?

Where did this cat come from? Why is his name Gary?

Like a lot of things, Gary was a group effort.

In the beginning, there were no cats or cat designs. But as cat memes started taking off in the 2000s, and as our design team grew, we started working them into our designs. 

We laid out the slogan “you’ve cat to be kitten me right meow” and must have had extra time on our hands because we decided to illustrate a cat to go with it. 

One of our designers, Jen Leatherby, illustrated our cat in "one take."

Her art is the masterpiece you see today! 

But he still didn't have a name. But since we didn't want to illustrate a bunch of cats, we used him on everything! 

In 2014, when we were moving into the building we’re in now, we had these huge letters spelling out RAYGUN that we were going to hang in the upper window.

One of our employees, Dylan Boyle, was holding them up inside while we were outside checking the height. He arranged them to spell GARY NU, then was like, “oops, mispelled the name of the store” and were like "ha ha ha etc etc." 

After that, "Gary" became a kind of inside joke for a bizarro RAYGUN. 

But around this same time, as the creative team grew, we looked for ways to give the company a voice for commentary on news, etc. We decided that we need a cast of characters who would be stand-ins for individuals -- we kind of stole this idea from Gorillaz.

The cat was character number one, and he took the name Gary. 

The second character was actually my idea: Nitro the Spaceman. His name is a nod to our original store, Smash – Nitro was the first musical track on The Offspring’s album Smash, 

The third character was the dog, Pancake. And, TBH, i’m not sure where Pancake’s name came from! I know our designer, Rachel, named her, and she’s from Magnet, Nebraska. 

But Gary, our fearless CFO, divorced father of 4, driven and grizzled, will always be our first…