Pusheen first appeared in May 2010 in the comic strip "Pusheen Things" on Claire Belton and Andrew Duff's website, Everyday Cute. In 2011, Belton and Duff launched a spin-off site dedicated to Pusheen. In 2013, Belton published I Am Pusheen The Cat, a collection of comic strips featuring Pusheen. Pusheen has become well known for appearing in sticker sets on Facebook, which are images that can be attached to personal messages or comments. The feature, including a set of Pusheen stickers, was introduced to iOS in April 2013, and added to the main website in July of the same year. In an article for PC Magazine on emoji and unicode, Sascha Segan referred to Pusheen as Facebook's "proprietary emoji", being used as a form of vendor lock-in.
Pusheen has become very popular over the years. It's website is a tumblr page that posts on the regular of illustrations of the cat. The Pusheen corporation started selling Pusheen merchandise after the popularity of the cat took off in July 2010. The first Pusheen merchandising was sold on the Everyday Cute website as a charm keychain, and necklace. From there the Merchandising expanded and now Pusheen Corp have teamed up with many brands to create and sell merchandise in stores such as Barnes & Noble, Hot Topic, and Petco. They have even expanded their merchandising to the website Hey Chickadee with merchandise collections dedicated to the cartoon cat, which range from plush toys by manufacturer Gund, clothing, accessories, knick-knacks, and much more. They even have a quarterly subscription box (which is a popular trend within online shopping) that is filled with Pusheen Products.
