Buying In - (Page 18) 18 rob walker demonstrable link to a factual backstory. But there is one more aspect to this first step in cracking the Desire Code. It’s the thing that turned Sanrio into a billion-dollar company. A Japanese firm, Sanrio has been in the “character goods” business since the 1960s. By one count, its artists have dreamed up more than 450 cute little creatures. The word character is a little misleading. The characters created by, for example, the Walt Disney Company or Marvel Entertainment first reach the world through a comic book or a movie or television show. They have attributes, personalities, and backstories. Sanrio’s characters (often animals) do not. They first reach the world by being emblazoned on products. Although they might be aesthetically charming, they are empty of specific meaning. One of Sanrio’s creations is probably familiar to you; certainly it’s familiar to young women all over the world and has been for decades. In 1974, Yuko Shimizu was a young designer on the staff of Sanrio. She had created several characters for the company, but none had caught on. Over time, she later explained, “I realized simplicity was what was important.” She was given the assignment of dreaming up some more characters to adorn small vinyl purses. She came up with six designs, only one of which did particularly well. That design was quite simple: a cat with a bow on its head and no mouth. (“I couldn’t express the mouth in a cute way,” Shimizu said, “so I decided not to use it.”) After some debate, her managing director gave it the name Hello Kitty and started putting the character on stationery, handkerchiefs, aprons, and so on. Before long, Shimizu was receiving fairly extraordinary fan mail. “I felt the power of Hello Kitty,” she later recalled somewhat cryptically. “And felt that it could be used as a tool for communication between people.”
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