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that is the founder of Sanrio, the company behind Hello Kitty.
Wikipedia on the history of Sanrio
after he added making sandals to his company, he found that adding cartoon characters to sandals made them sell to more people, but it was expensive to pay royalties, so he hired his own designers.
In 1974, Yuko Shimizu started working for a company called Sanrio, which specialised in rubber sandals decorated with strawberry prints. Eager to create another best-selling product, the company started hiring lots of young illustrators to come up with a new winning design. Yuko and her fellow illustrators had a simple brief centred around the word 'kawaii', meaning cute.
So Hello Kitty was not the only design they made. Back to the BBC article:
Is Hello Kitty a cat?
The inspiration for Hello Kitty came from Yuko’s childhood. I was thrilled and the memory stayed with me, so, I decided to create a character from the little kitten. “When I was a child, I got a small white kitten from my father for a birthday present,” she said.
however as Hello Kitty fans know, the company has written the history of the character herself:
Sanrio have provided a detailed backstory for Hello Kitty. According to the company, Hello Kitty’s real name is Kitty White and she was born in England. She isn’t a cat. Instead she’s an eight-year-old girl and she has her own pet cat of her own called Charmmy Kitty.
