Somewhere in Tokyo in 1974, a designer drew a small white cat sitting side-on, a red bow over one ear, a bottle of milk and a goldfish bowl beside her. No mouth. Fifty years later that cat has graced an airliner, a UNICEF title, a Balenciaga collaboration and a haute couture runway in Paris. Meanwhile, in Seoul, a fox the colour of bubblegum fronts a toddler song so persistent it became the most-watched video in YouTube history.

Hello Kitty and Baby Shark look like flukes. They are not. They are the two clearest lessons available in how fictional faces become serious businesses.

Character branding is the practice of building a fictional figure into a brand in its own right, owned as intellectual property and earning money through licensing, content and merchandise, so that people choose the character rather than any single product it appears on.

That last clause is the whole game. Nobody buys a pencil case because it is a good pencil case. They buy it because Kuromi is on it.

Who actually made Hello Kitty, and why does a gift shop company own her?

Sanrio did not start as an entertainment company. Shintaro Tsuji founded it in 1960 as the Yamanashi Silk Company, and it took the Sanrio name in 1973. The business was gifts: small, affordable things people give one another. Characters were a way to make those things feel personal.

Yuko Shimizu designed Hello Kitty in 1974, and the first product, a vinyl coin purse, went on sale in Japan in March 1975. Yuko Yamaguchi has been her lead designer since 1980, an astonishing run of stewardship for a single face.

Notice the order. The product came first; the character was there to make the product lovable. Only later did the relationship flip, until the purse became merely a place to put the cat. That inversion is the moment a mascot turns into a brand.

The blank face that sells everything

Here is the cleverest decision in the history of cute. Sanrio has said Kitty has no drawn mouth so that people can project their own feelings onto her. Happy owner, happy Kitty. Sad owner, sympathetic Kitty. She is a mirror with ears.

The blankness does cultural work too: it let a cute Japanese export carry an intimate feeling across the Pacific while staying slightly distant and cool. But the commercial logic is simpler. A character with a fixed personality fits a limited set of products and moods. A character with an open face fits nearly all of them. Coin purses. Trainers. Handbags. Phone cases.

Sanrio built a biography around the blank, and kept it light. Her official name is Kitty White. She was born in the suburbs of London. She has a twin sister, Mimmy. In 2014, when an anthropologist reported that Sanrio did not regard her as simply a cat, the internet lost its mind for a week, and Sanrio clarified that it had never called her human. The episode proved something useful: millions of adults cared deeply about the species of a cartoon. That is brand equity you cannot buy with media spend.

Fifty years of saying yes (carefully)

Sanrio’s growth engine is licensing. Rather than make everything itself, it lends Kitty to partners who do, and takes a royalty. By 2008 there were more than 50,000 Hello Kitty products in over 60 countries. EVA Air flew a Hello Kitty-liveried Airbus from 2005, then revived the idea with three more jets. UNICEF made her a children’s ambassador in the United States in 1983 and later gave her the title Special Friend of Children.

The risk with licensing is obvious. Say yes to everything and you become wallpaper. Kitty’s popularity has had its peaks and troughs. What kept her climbing back was selectivity and ambition in partners. Sanrio began co-branding with globally relevant names in the early 2000s, before collaborations were a standard marketing reflex, and it has since paired Kitty with adidas, Barbour, Chloé, Balenciaga and Crocs. In July 2025 Hello Kitty and Kuromi turned up in Kevin Germanier’s haute couture show in Paris.

The trick is range without dilution. A Barbour jacket and a pair of Crocs both make sense because Kitty stands for something small and stable (friendship, kindness, a little moment of comfort) rather than for a product category. When your character means a feeling, you can license her almost anywhere the feeling belongs.

When Singapore queued all night for a cat

Want proof that character branding can outrun the product it is attached to? Ask anyone in Singapore who was alive in January 2000.

McDonald’s Singapore ran a promotion selling pairs of Hello Kitty and her boyfriend Dear Daniel dressed in wedding costumes from different Asian cultures, S$4.50 a pair with an Extra Value Meal. People queued overnight. On 13 January a glass door at the Boon Keng Road outlet shattered under the crowd, injuring at least seven. By late January six people had been arrested, three of them for rioting at one outlet. The chain hired well over a hundred security staff. Some 2.8 million toys were sold.

Nobody was rioting for burgers. The meal was the delivery mechanism; the cat was the product. It is the clearest demonstration you will find of a borrowed character carrying more desire than the host brand.

It also carries a warning. When a character is more wanted than you are, you are renting her pull, not owning it.

From one star to a whole cast

For decades Sanrio’s biggest strength was also its biggest exposure: one cat carrying the company. The response, under Tomokuni Tsuji, who took over from his grandfather in 2020 at 31, has been a deliberate multi-character strategy.

Sanrio has created more than 450 characters. It runs an annual fan poll, in place since 1986, that tells it which ones are rising. Kuromi, the punkish rival created in 2005, is now openly positioned as the next key character for North America. My Melody, Cinnamoroll and Pompompurin each have their own fan bases and anniversaries. Gudetama, the egg yolk too lazy to get up, earned an International Emmy nomination for its Netflix series.

Sanrio’s Supercute Adventures series puts Hello Kitty’s wider cast centre stage, the multi-character strategy in action.

The numbers suggest the cast approach works. In the year to March 2025 Sanrio reported record profits, and overseas licensing royalties from North America more than doubled. In the year to March 2026, net sales reached roughly ¥194 billion with an operating margin of about 40 per cent.

Think of it as a portfolio of personalities. Kitty is the steady blue chip. Kuromi brings the teenage edge Kitty cannot. Gudetama is the in-joke for exhausted adults. Each opens a door the others would look wrong walking through.

How did a campfire song become a stock market listing?

Now cross to Seoul. In 2010 three former game developers, among them Kim Min-seok, founded SmartStudy and decided they were tired of making games. They built children’s apps and videos instead, fronted by Pinkfong, a magenta fox.

Their breakout was a song they did not write. “Baby Shark” is an old campfire and camp-counsellor chant, widely believed to be in the public domain. Pinkfong’s version, the “Baby Shark Dance” uploaded on 17 June 2016, added bright animation, a brisk tempo and hand moves a toddler can copy. It spread through Indonesia and Southeast Asia in 2017, entered the Billboard Hot 100 in January 2019, and on 2 November 2020 overtook “Despacito” as the most-viewed video on YouTube. In January 2022 it became the first to pass ten billion views.

Pinkfong’s ‘Baby Shark Dance’, the most-viewed video in YouTube history, built on a traditional campfire song.

Then came the brand moves. Baseball’s Washington Nationals adopted the song in their 2019 season, when outfielder Gerardo Parra used it as walk-up music, and won the World Series. Nickelodeon launched Baby Shark’s Big Show! in December 2020. SmartStudy renamed itself The Pinkfong Company in January 2022, which tells you exactly what it believed its asset was. On 18 November 2025 it listed on KOSDAQ, raised about 76 billion won and saw its shares jump roughly 60 per cent on debut.

Can you brand something nobody owns?

Yes. With a caveat the size of a shark.

An American singer, Johnny Only, who had released his own family-friendly “Baby Shark” in 2011, sued in South Korea. In 2021 the Seoul Central District Court found Pinkfong had not infringed his rights, partly because the tune came from oral tradition. South Korea’s Supreme Court dismissed his final appeal in August 2025.

So Pinkfong does not own the song in any exclusive sense. What it owns is its arrangement, its animation, its characters and, above all, its recognisability. Anyone can sing “doo doo doo”. Only one company has the shark family, the pink fox and ten billion views of association. That is the lesson for any brand built on a common idea: your protection lies in the distinctive execution and the characters you attach to it, not the underlying concept.

The one-hit problem

Every parent knows the downside of Baby Shark. On the forums where people talk about the song, the jokes write themselves: grown adults who have heard it a billion times; children who demand it on repeat for hours; sceptics arguing that ten billion views cannot be real when the world holds eight billion people (views are plays, not people, and one toddler with a tablet can rack up hundreds). Earworm and irritant are the same property, seen from different seats.

The business question is harder. How do you avoid becoming the company with one song? Pinkfong’s answer copies Sanrio’s: build a cast. Bebefinn, a toddler-family series launched in 2022, reached the top of Netflix’s kids rankings in 11 countries. Ahead of the listing, flagship characters (Baby Shark, Pinkfong and Hogi) made up about 77 per cent of revenue and Bebefinn around 15 per cent, with the company aiming for Bebefinn to rise sharply. It has said it wants to launch new characters every two years, push into webtoons, and sell more physical goods, including an apparel line with Shein.

Sanrio took five decades to learn that one face is a fragile foundation. Pinkfong is trying to learn it in five years.

Two playbooks, one principle

Side by side, the contrast is stark.

	Sanrio	Pinkfong
Origin	Gifts and stationery	Apps and video
Breakout character	Designed in-house (1974)	Built on a public-domain song (2016)
Engine	Licensing and collaborations	Views, then licensing and shows
Audience	Children, then adults who never let go	Toddlers, and the parents who endure them
Current task	Spreading weight across a big cast	Proving there is life after one hit

The principle underneath is identical. A character becomes a brand when people form a relationship with it that survives the product, the platform and the season. Kitty outlived the coin purse. Baby Shark outlived the YouTube algorithm that launched it. Both did it by being instantly recognisable, emotionally simple and endlessly reusable.

What your business can borrow

Most firms will never own a Hello Kitty. Plenty could use a character, though: a bank’s mascot, a snack brand’s cartoon, a school’s friendly animal. Six principles travel.

Design for projection, not description. Simple shapes, limited colours, a face that can carry many moods. The more a character explains itself, the fewer places it fits.

Write a light biography. A name, a home, a sibling, a favourite food. Enough for fans to hold on to; not so much it locks you in.

Separate the character from the product. If your mascot only ever sells one item, it is a label. Give it its own content, its own moments, its own fans.

Choose partners who raise the character’s status. One clever collaboration with a respected brand does more than fifty lazy licences. Say no often.

Plan the second character early. Every successful character company eventually discovers the risk of a single star. Build the cast before you need it.

Guard the distinctive bits. If your idea is common, your protection is the drawing, the voice, the colour and the name. Register and police those.

Picture a Joo Chiat bakery with a round, sleepy bun character on its boxes. Week one, it is decoration. If the bun gets a name, a weekly comic on Instagram, a plush at Chinese New Year and a cameo on a tote, it starts to earn affection the bakery itself never could. That is character branding at neighbourhood scale, and the mechanics are the same ones Sanrio has run for fifty years.

Quick answers

What is the difference between a mascot and a branded character?
A mascot represents a company or product, like a team’s animal. A branded character is intellectual property in its own right, with content and merchandise of its own, and can be licensed to other companies.

Why doesn’t Hello Kitty have a mouth?
Sanrio has explained that the missing mouth lets people project their own feelings onto her. That blankness is a large part of why she suits such a wide range of products and audiences.

Does Pinkfong own the Baby Shark song?
The underlying tune is a traditional campfire song, and South Korean courts found Pinkfong had not infringed another singer’s version. Pinkfong owns its own recording, animation and characters, which is where its brand value sits.

Thinking about giving your brand a face people will queue for? Start with the strategy behind it at Firefish brand strategy.