Hello Kitty owner turns things around by licensing anything and everything


Source: Pop Crunch

I’ve long been a detractor of Sanrio’s policy of licensing Hello Kitty’s image to appear on just about anything (and some offerings have been downright questionable [NSFW]). But apparently, if you throw hundreds of darts at the board over ten years, you’re eventually going to hit a few bulls-eyes:

Sanrio Co., the Japanese owner of the Hello Kitty character brand, may boost profit after arresting a 10-year slide in sales by slapping its logo on wine, wallpaper and minicars.

The popularity of Hello Kitty, a white cat with a red bow and no mouth, with celebrities including Lady Gaga and Paris Hilton, has led the company to focus on licensing and to pare its retail and restaurant businesses (Sanrio intends to shut 40 of its 260 gift shops in Japan over the next three years).

Sanrio almost doubled overseas licenses last year and counts clothing chains Hennes & Mauritz AB and Inditex SA as customers. President Shintaro Tsuji, 82, plans to set up an office in Dubai this month to grow in the Middle East.

An appearance by Hilton, a reality TV player, at Sanrio’s 35th birthday party for Hello Kitty, and by Gaga, a pop singer, on Japanese television holding a stuffed toy, helped the company boost fiscal 2009 sales 0.8 percent from the previous year, the first annual gain since 1999.

“Hello Kitty’s Zen-like calmness and faceless expression are the major reasons for its appeal across age groups and markets,” said Martin Roll, chief executive officer of Singapore-based consulting firm VentureRepublic.

Note that a major part of the strategy is to “expand beyond Europe, North America, and Japan” — in other words, the developed world might have had enough of Hello Kitty, so now it’s time to endear her to the rest of the world. Click through to see Lady Gaga in a Japanese TV appearance, decked out in Hello Kitty everything:

(via Bloomberg)

15 thoughts on “Hello Kitty owner turns things around by licensing anything and everything”

  1. “Hello Kitty’s Zen-like calmness and faceless expression are the major reasons for its appeal across age groups and markets,”

    I react to the use of ‘zen’ in precisely the same way you react to the use of ‘kabuki’, Adamu.

  2. In “Hello Kitty”universe,”Kitty White”,the mouthless is a Briton lives in the suburb of London….

  3. Yeah, that article was the first time I’d even heard that Kitty has a biography. Lives in London and likes cookies? Really?

    It does bring up the question, though, of how “foreign” was Kitty portrayed as when first introduced in Japan? While I think it’s safe to say that at present she is considered the epitome of Japanesness both in Japan and abroad, it sounds like she was originally sold with a bit of an exotic, foreign, flavor.

  4. Peter:
    Those are two very different takes on the same story. NYT seems more focused on the declining sales in Japan, whereas Bloomberg is intrigued by the overseas growth prospects and cost-cutting efforts. Also, there is some inconsistency between the company’s plans to keep going with licensing (which Bloomberg highlighted), vs. the perspectives in the NYT article of a Sanrio designer and industry analysts who think the company’s suffering from a lack of compelling content.

  5. “how “foreign” was Kitty portrayed as when first introduced in Japan?”

    Kitty was shown living in a kind of European “fairy tale land” in the narrative stuff.

  6. “Kitty was shown living in a kind of European “fairy tale land” in the narrative stuff.”

    I think that narrative has broken when her boy friend Daniel Star had moved to Pretoria,South Africa.
    http://bit.ly/9WDgE0

    “Hello Kitty’s Zen-like calmness and faceless expression are the major reasons for its appeal across age groups and markets,”

    I think there are more to her mouthlessness aside from Zen element.
    When I was kid in the early 70’s,this guy was quite popular in Japan.
    Meet “Mousty”from Belguim….

    http://bit.ly/beLKN9

  7. “Faceless expression”? I think they meant “expressionless face”.

  8. Personally,I find it much more disturbing to wed by fake priest than by fairy robots.

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