Hello Kitty is small. So small, in fact, that her parent company, Sanrio, measures Kitty’s height in apples: She is five apples tall. How cute! That’s Hello Kitty in a nutshell, a cute cat.
Actually, not quite. She is, as Sanrio insists, a girl who happens to look like a cat. Hello Kitty is also British. She lives in the suburbs of London with Charmmy Kitty, her pet cat (an actual feline). “Hello Kitty” isn’t even her real name — it’s Kitty White. And she has had a boyfriend for 25 years: Dear Daniel, a little boy who also looks like a little cat. Hello Kitty is blood type A.
Surely, at least one of these facts is new to you. But that you never needed to know any of them is a testament to what actually makes Hello Kitty powerful. (Hint: It’s not her origin story.) Kitty’s power is that she can be anything and everything. She is eternal and she is inevitable, death and taxes with a red bow (to be clear, her bow is canonically red, not pink). Kitty’s potency is, almost literally, face value. She is her own best asset, in that she can be infinitely licensed and applied to situations and products that were inconceivable when she was “born” in 1974. She’s collaborated with Balenciaga and Blumarine, Nike and adidas, Converse and Crocs, even Yohji Yamamoto. She poses on BAPE hoodies, dances across Baggu bags. She commanded “big boys” to do their “thang” on Stussy T-shirts and inspired a barely-there GCDS bikini.
Kitty can do all this because she’s as much a creation of corporate necessity as Sanrio. Founder Shintaro Tsuji — who celebrates his 97th birthday in 2024, the same year that Kitty turns 50 — cut his entrepreneurial chops in 1960s Tokyo with a company that bore the decidedly un-twee name of Yamanashi Silk Center Co. and specialized in decidedly un-twee local exports like textiles. It was after Tsuji noticed that zori sandals — predecessors of the modern-day flip-flop — sold more readily once they were decorated cutely (specifically, with tiny flowers), that Yamanashi Silk Center Co. expanded to more winsome fare, like poetry books and greeting cards. And thus, Tsuji hit upon a formula that would ensure his future fortune: cute = cash.
One year after Tsuji renamed his business to Sanrio and began commissioning original character art for the sake of beautifying (or, really, cute-ifying) Sanrio’s merch, Hello Kitty came into being.
Her first outing came a year after she was originally sketched, though Kitty’s debut was as humble as it was auspicious. In 1975, Sanrio produced a tiny coin case cutely called the Petite Purse, decorated with a white cat staring deadpan beneath bold bubble letters bellowing “HELLO!”
And so began our heroine’s story. The Petite Purse swiftly became a top seller for Sanrio and observant Tsuji pushed for more products to be patterned with this inviting feline. Within a decade, Hello Kitty had become a UNICEF ambassador, and uber-successful Sanrio joined the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
“Tsuji knew that the six-year-old girls who bought Hello Kitty products as kids were [eventually] going to be 36, buying the same sort of products for their daughters,” Ken Belson, co-author of 2004’s still-relevant Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon, says when I call him to talk all things Kitty on a muggy May morning. “Tsuji didn’t want Hello Kitty to be a fad; he wanted it to be sustainable. He expanded the range very early on: There were Hello Kitty notebooks for children, colored pencils for older kids, and handbags for adults. But they’d also remove 500 to 600 products from circulation every year to keep the product line fresh.” This constant renewal demanded a ceaseless parade of similarly refreshed Kitty personas.
But, despite a deepening cultural appetite for Hello Kitty, 1980s shoppers were not entirely aligned with all of Sanrio’s switch-ups. Kitty briefly suffered a particularly “controversial” monochrome period, for instance, wherein she was rendered as a colorless stencil outline. No little yellow nose, no red bow; Kitty’s first notable flop, according to Belson. A subsequent princess rebrand came too little, too late: Even buoyed by a booming Japanese yen, the competition facing this not-yet-fully-formed Hello Kitty was simply too stiff. International pop culture was buckling under the weight of cuddly, collectible cartoon characters ranging in staying power from Garfield to Monchhichi. Especially outside of Japan, a mouthless cat suffering growing pains was destined to fare poorly.
Ironically, Hello Kitty came roaring back during Japan’s economic collapse in the ’90s thanks in large part to new interest from the Western market.
“The Hello Kitty revival happened in the mid-’90s when the value of the Japanese yen fell drastically and major Japanese banks went bankrupt,” Kumiko Sato wrote in “From Hello Kitty to Cod Roe Kewpie: A Postwar Cultural History of Cuteness in Japan.” According to Sato, Japanese corporations incidentally affected the first traceable wave of Hello Kitty nostalgia by upping their brands’ adorability in bids to appeal to consumers both young and elderly. Out went the unsmiling, unfriendly corporate presences of Sony, Mitsubishi, and Toyota, replaced with charming mascots and intentionally goofy adverts. Hello Kitty, innately popular with younger converts and rose-tinted glasses-wearing older shoppers, was already positioned perfectly to ride this new wave of cute. Simultaneously, the West was under the sway of kawaii (“cute”) imports from Japan, a movement that incorporated anime (cartoons), manga (comics), video games, and, yes, Hello Kitty. Pop stars, especially, helped propel Kitty to unwitting stardom: Christina Aguilera, Gwen Stefani, and Avril Lavigne each boosted Kitty, while Lisa Loeb’s Hello Lisa was an overt Sanrio-approved homage. Kitty “was picked up with a somewhat-ironic, tongue-in-cheek trapping in America. A ‘forever young’ sort of thing,” notes Belson. “Whereas in Japan, it’s always been very earnest. She’s everywhere, like wallpaper.” Regardless whether newfound interest in Kitty was entirely earnest, the resulting boom was entirely sincere — to this day, according to Belson, Hello Kitty is not afforded an advertising budget, partially due to Tsuji’s explicit desire to grow Sanrio and its characters organically.
This is the cycle of Hello Kitty that continues to this day: an ouroboros of timelessly timely adorableness destined to be rediscovered by each subsequent generation. And because Kitty is so culturally omnipresent, nostalgia is baked into her very ethos, even if the viewer didn’t grow up with her. Kitty is representative of your childhood whether or not she was actually there to enjoy it with you.
Hello Kitty’s broad appeal really does come back to her ingenious design — she is the modern Mona Lisa. That perfectly inexpressive, inscrutable stare says so much and so little, allowing Kitty to translate fluidly from a Balenciaga bag to a Starface pimple patch to adidas sneakers. “We used to say she wahells a zen cat,” Belson says. “A vessel for whatever emotions you want to put into it at that moment.” It’s also crucial that, further distinguishing her from other mascots, Kitty wasn’t born of a specific medium. Snoopy is a rascal and Garfield even more so but Kitty can be anything. Her “wide and diverse presence is possible thanks to her design,” concurs Silvia Figini, COO Sanrio EMEA, India and Oceania. “Historically, the Hello Kitty brand has always offered extreme flexibility to its partners. This allowed the opening to co-branding in times when licensing companies were still very focused only on themselves.” Not every licensee is willing to share their prize possessions, you see, but Sanrio is a “very adaptable company,” Belson adds. “They’ll license anything but tobacco, alcohol, and sharp things,” such as knives.
Credit goes to Kitty’s original illustrator, Yuko Shimizu, who left Sanrio almost immediately after Kitty’s debut. But perhaps even more credit is due to Yuko Yamaguchi, who took over as the designer of Hello Kitty in 1980 and remains key to developing Kitty’s consistent newness and fleshing out pertinent gaps in Kitty’s lore. For instance, in a 2016 interview with Singapore’s Today newspaper, Yamaguchi explained that Hello Kitty is British because, in the ’70s, Britain was a dreamlike destination that fascinated young Japanese girls. “Britain seemed like a place straight out of a fairytale,” she said.
But the Hello Kitty mythos was largely concocted piecemeal and on the fly; remember, Kitty was quite literally born to sell purses. Thus, even as Sanrio has retroactively outfitted Kitty with a name, a boyfriend, and a pet cat, her history remains riddled with apocrypha. For instance, while some outlets assert that Shimizu created and named Hello Kitty after she read Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (chapter one, first sentence: “One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it”), the reclusive Shimizu said in a 2011 interview that Kitty’s “origin of inspiration” was actually a white cat she herself owned as a child.
Really, though, the most meaningful thing about Kitty is how much she means to young people. “She feels like one of the first characters that came out of East Asia who was appreciated by Westerners,” says Isabel Gilmour, a lifelong Hello Kitty fan and New York–based project manager. “I’m Asian-American, and there were countless moments where the things I liked, did, or ate were thought of as ‘strange’ by my white friends, but everyone got Hello Kitty. Cute is universal.”
“I’ve found a sort of community online and in life around Hello Kitty,” enthuses Oluschi Harmon, a graphic designer living in Brooklyn. “It started in my friend group when we randomly assigned each other to a [Sanrio] character based on a meme! Hello Kitty and friends are like zodiac signs for unhinged girlies!”
I lived in Japan in 2015. Whenever I needed an added dose of instant culture shock, I’d visit Village Vanguard, a retail chain so densely loaded with goods that it makes Disney stores look like Prada Marfa. The interior of each Village Vanguard is uniquely shaped by the desires of each shop’s employees, which means that no two shops look exactly alike, though they’re all guaranteed to be wildly overstimulating, packed with so much merch that their overburdened shelves inevitably give way to free-floating displays overflowing with stuff. Books? Enough to fill a library. DVDs? By the truckload. Anime? Ample. Of course, Sanrio merch is abundant. Hello Kitty is thoroughly represented, along with My Melody, Kuromi, Badtz-Maru, Cinnamoroll, and all the rest, a reminder that Sanrio is more than just Hello Kitty: It actually holds dominion over 450 unique mascots. Hello Kitty is merely the most famous.
As a company, Sanrio inadvertently mirrors its collection of characters: The uninitiated may think there’s only one, but, in reality, it is legion. Unlike other comparable multinational corporations with their rigid top-down structures, Sanrio comprises a vast network of loosely connected subsidiaries that appear to report to the home base in Japan even though, regionally, it gets complicated. For instance, despite there also being domestic Sanrio branches in Tokyo, Shanghai, Taiwan, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong (there are two in Hong Kong, in fact), there also exists Sanrio Global Asia and Sanrio Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, Sanrio GmbH is a separate entity that’s based in Milan and handles the entirety of Europe all by itself.
This baffling web of companies came about as part of Sanrio’s unplanned international expansion and seems to confuse even some of the company’s own staff — not that it’s been bad for business, clearly. “Though Sanrio is a publicly traded company in Japan, it’s still in some ways a family business,” Belson says. “Not in a demeaning way, just that they aren’t quite as hip to modern corporate practices.”
Even getting in touch with someone from Sanrio for this piece was a proper adventure. I spoke directly and indirectly to a half-dozen Sanrio representatives over the course of my reporting, from European marketing managers to third-party PR agents, with even more in CC. I held out hopes of speaking to more, but it wasn’t in the cards. The number of people I interacted with, or tried to, reminded me, in a way, of Sanrio’s many characters. Briefly, I’d constructed my own menagerie of digital acquaintances, a cast of friendly if enigmatic figures. While framing Kitty’s recipe for international success, Sanrio COO Figini perfectly, if accidentally, also sums up the situation I found myself in. “Just think of Hello Kitty’s motto,” she says. “‘You can never have too many friends.’”
