Take a walk down memory lane with an old favorite

The character is based on a cartoon designed by the Japanese company Sanrio during the summer of 1974. It is supposed to be a Japanese bobtail cat and is easy to identify among the many products on sale today. He has a rounded appearance and normally sports a red bow and dress, although other designs also exist, such as pink plaid, unusually, he usually does not have a mouth, more on this later.

When Sanrio first created products featuring this cute cat, they could hardly imagine the extent of its worldwide success. Today, annual sales of Hello Kitty branded products exceed £1 billion! It is present in more than 40,000 different products and is sold in more than 50 different countries, including the United States and Japan.

According to the Sanrio group, this cheeky little kitty has multicultural origins, with dual nationality, shared between England and Japan, she really is a kitty born from a contemporary society. With those sorts of diplomatic credentials, it should come as no surprise that, as a brand, it has acted as an ambassador for more than one official function, including tourism in Hong Kong and China, and even had an ambassadorial role at the International Children’s Organization. The United Nations. Background, and there’s hardly a sweeter character to use for that purpose.

The reasons for her suitability as a children’s ambassador are twofold. First of all, it was created in the wake of the student riots in Japan during 1971, its rounded features and cute image were purposely designed to situate the general population, by offering alternative stereotypes to the violence that had become the signature of the country during that troubled era. . Second, because she was drawn without a mouth, this imbued her with a psychological advantage; it allowed for empathy between people and the image of her, as without expression, people could project their own feelings onto the character and create a quasi-sense of camaraderie with her.

During the 1980s, Hello Kitty walked a lonely path and lost some of its worldwide popularity, but in the 1990s, Sanrio’s marketing strategy blessed her with a second chance. The 1990s saw a general trend in popular culture towards nostalgia or ‘retro’. Stores began stocking products to appeal to an older generation than usual: pre-teen girls. For people who had grown up with the brand and loved it, she made it easy to return to a nostalgic past. Today, there is an incredible variety of adult products, such as adult clothing, wedding cards, computer accessories… as we all take a much-loved trip down memory lane; our fateful kitty companion walks beside us, a firm favorite.