Hello Kitty and the Bay Area: A Love Story

Laura Chin walked into the Hello Kitty Cafe, dressed for the occasion.

Wearing a pink milkmaid dress adorned with sprinkles, the longtime Sanrio fan completed her outfit with black cat ears and various themed accessories. Greeted by cases filled with cute Hello Kitty-themed confectionery and employees sporting signature pink aprons, the experience elevated Chin’s love for the Japanese brand.

“Sanrio is often dismissed as just a cute pastel brand for children, or perhaps a nostalgic relic of Y2K,” Chin says. “But we overlook its cultural depth; it has enduring relevance. It has a really big aesthetic influence across, I believe, generations and even subcultures.”

That influence is reaching fever pitch in the Bay Area. When Westfield Valley Fair mall unveiled the Hello Kitty Cafe in mid-July, a reported 500 people lined up for opening day.

At a Giants baseball game in June, which sold out before the season even began, tens of thousands of fans lined up around the block to scramble for a Hello Kitty Giants jersey giveaway.

As a longtime Sanrio and Giants fan, Sarah Naini lined up at exactly 9 a.m. and was able to score one of the 15,000 free jerseys at around noon. But not everyone was as lucky.

“A lot of my friends came in 30 to 45 minutes after me, and they didn’t even end up getting one because the line was that long,” Naini says. “I’ve gone to many Giants games and I’ve never seen the line that long, even before a game. I was asking one of the workers, and she said it was the craziest line that she’s ever seen in history.”

What might seem like an unusual frenzy in the region has an explanation, and it’s not just the Bay Area’s substantial Asian population.

As it turns out, Sanrio’s roots in the Bay Area go back almost to its very beginnings, more than 50 years ago.

A not-so-Hollywood beginning

Before Hello Kitty took over cafe menus and baseball stadiums, she slowly built her empire here in the United States.

In the book Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon, authors Ken Belson and Brian Bremner explain that even early on, Sanrio founder Shintaro Tsuji’s goal for the Japanese brand was to expand to North America.

“Like many Japanese businessmen, Tsuji was keenly focused on what was going on overseas,” Belson and Bremner write. “In the character-goods industry, there was no place better than America or, more specifically, Hollywood.”

But Sanrio didn’t debut in Hollywood’s cinematic spotlight. The company’s first North American satellite office was right here in the Bay Area, in South San Francisco.

Randy Patterson, former vice president of retail and wholesale at Sanrio North America, notes in the Netflix documentary series The Toys That Made Us that there were “a couple of warehouses in South San Francisco that were just chock-full of inventory.”

This modest start in South San Francisco soon gave way to a more visible presence nearby. If you were around San José in the 1970s, you might recall Sanrio’s first-ever retail store in the United States.

Known as Gift Gate, the first, but certainly not the last, Sanrio store was located in Eastridge Mall, on the second level near Macy’s.

For longtime San José resident Cynthia Pilgrim, Eastridge was her go-to, and she still remembers the feeling of visiting the Sanrio store as a child.

“It was an attractive store, very colorful, very inviting — and that just stirred up something about your own childhood that made you curious,” Pilgrim says. “You wanted to go inside and figure out what the store was about. So, I loved it for the colors, and Hello Kitty was a big part of it. She was always in the window or somewhere nearby.”

The Bay Area beagle who helped Hello Kitty

When it comes to Sanrio characters, along with Hello Kitty, fans may also think of My Melody, Kuromi or even Cinnamoroll.

But in his company’s early days, Tsuji started out selling a character a little more local to the Bay Area.

Tsuji was a fan of Charles Schulz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip and a longtime resident of Santa Rosa.

He met Schulz in 1970 and secured the license to market Snoopy and other Peanuts characters in Japan, marking an important step in Sanrio’s international expansion.

Before long, the cultural exchange came full circle. In the 1980s, a mall in Santa Rosa hosted a Sanrio store, too.

By securing the license for Snoopy, a character with direct ties to the Bay Area through Schulz and his studio, Sanrio laid important groundwork for expanding Hello Kitty and other characters across North America.

More than just cute

Sanrio’s early presence in the Bay Area turned into a lasting connection. Stores like Gift Gate did more than sell products — they created experiences that sparked curiosity and brought a touch of “cute” into everyday life.

For many, Hello Kitty and her friends became comforting childhood companions.

That affection didn’t fade with age. Instead, it evolved into something richer. Chin, a political science professor at De Anza Community College and longtime fan, has seen kawaii culture flourish not only among her students but the community at large.

Plush toys and character charms have moved beyond children’s accessories to become symbols of identity and emotional expression for people of all ages.

Chin describes these characters as “emotional surrogates,” offering care, optimism and even rebellion. In today’s world of emotional burnout and constant pressure, both especially strong in the Bay Area, she sees softness as a form of resistance.

For many, kawaii culture also provides a space for memory, joy, and cultural belonging.

“I think of Sanrio’s modern revival not as regression, but as an emotional reclamation that these are symbols that are not just for kids,” Chin says. “They’re for everybody. They’re for anyone who understands that cuteness is joy, that cuteness can be armor, that identity is fluid, and that joy is worth displaying. And to love Sanrio, it’s to say that I remember who I was. I honor who I am. And I carry both with me, sometimes clipped to my purse in plushy form.”