Sanrio already had several characters set in the US, and it wanted Hello Kitty to be different. Sanrio decided to make Hello Kitty British because foreign countries, in particular Britain, were trendy in Japan at the time of Hello Kitty's creation. He first considered 'Hi Kitty' before finally settling on 'Hello Kitty,' her current name. Sanrio's motto is 'social communication,' and Tsuji wanted the brand name to reflect that by including a greeting. Shimizu got the name Kitty from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass during a scene early in the book, Alice plays with a cat she calls Kitty.

Hello Kitty was initially known only as 'the white kitten with no name' ( 名前のない白い子猫). Hello Kitty was designed by Yuko Shimizu and was added to the lineup of early Sanrio characters in 1974. Tsuji noted the profits gained by adding a cute design to the shoes and hired cartoonists to design cute characters for his merchandise. In 1962, Shintaro Tsuji, founder of Sanrio, began selling rubber sandals with flowers painted on them. Ĭreation and design Yuko Shimizu was the original designer of Hello Kitty. In 2008, there were over 50,000 different Hello Kitty branded products. A variety of products have featured the character over the years, like school supplies, clothing, accessories, and toys, along with other items. The Hello Kitty media franchise has grown to include a number of animated series targeted towards children, as well as several comics, animated films, video games, books, music albums and other media productions. There are Sanrio theme parks based on Hello Kitty: Harmonyland in Hiji, Ōita, Japan, Sanrio Puroland in Tama New Town, Tokyo, Japan, and Hello Kitty Shanghai Times in Shanghai, China. UNICEF has appointed Hello Kitty children's ambassador and the Japanese government appointed her ambassador of tourism. By 2010 the character was worth $5 billion a year and The New York Times called her a 'global marketing phenomenon.' By 2014, when Hello Kitty was 40 years old, she was worth about $8 billion a year. The brand went into decline in Japan after the 1990s, but continued to grow in the international market. Hello Kitty's popularity also grew with the emergence of kawaii (cute) culture. Originally, Hello Kitty was only marketed towards pre-teenage girls, but beginning in the 1990s, the brand found commercial success among teenage and adult consumers as well. Hello Kitty was created in 1974 and the first item, a vinyl coin purse, was introduced in 1975. According to her backstory, she lives in a London suburb with her family, and is close to her twin sister Mimmy, who is depicted with a yellow bow.

Sanrio depicts Hello Kitty as an anthropomorphized white cat with a red bow and no visible mouth. Hello Kitty ( Japanese: ハロー・キティ, Hepburn: Harō Kiti ), also known by her real name Kitty White ( キティ・ホワイト, Kiti Howaito), is a fictional character created by Yuko Shimizu, currently designed by Yuko Yamaguchi, and owned by the Japanese company Sanrio. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.You may also add the template to the talk page.A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Japanese Wikipedia article at ] see its history for attribution. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation.If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality.

Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 3,701 articles in the main category, and specifying |topic= will aid in categorization.Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.

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