The Bugg Report caught up with Athena Law, Senior Licensing Executive at Sanrio in Hong Kong to hear about all the latest update from Sanrio in the region.
Your stand at the HKILS looks fantastic this year – what is behind this all new look?
Thank you. We would like to introduce our 91st character – Little Miss Inventor to Hong Kong and other global business partners. We chose the theme from one of the new series’ book title – adventure in space, and was thinking to include some special elements/effect, like Neon (from one of our high end style guide) with the aim to bring up our target audience not only limited to families & kids, but also kidult.
You have some amazing characters on display this year – can you tell us about them?
The giant one on the backdrop is our 91st character Little Miss Inventor. She is intelligent, ingenious and inventive character. She is not only inventing for herself but also for her friends. Apart from new characters, we have also collaborated with fashion brand – Stayreal, it was run by one of Taiwan’s famous band vocal artists – Ashin. We created a new character, Mr. Ashin for him, and transformed their band character into Mr. Mousy to match into the Mr Men family 🙂
What were some Sanrio highlights from 2018 that you can share with us?
In 2018, we have the 91st character to join in our Mr. Men family and McDonald figurine Happy Meal redemption in-store globally. Then we also have new publishing book titles launched in South Korea and China markets. We also have many more projects that are targeting to kidault, like the cosmetic band – La Mer, fashion band – Hazzy Golf and Jill by Jill Stuart, the 1st pop-up café in Asian markets in Singapore.
What can we look forward to from Sanrio in 2019?
We will have an all-new collaboration with one of Hong Kong’s local illustrators; a new high-end style guide featuring Hong Kong’s fashion brand collection; we will also be carrying on to have more variety of titles for publishing in South Korea and China.
Anything else we should keep and eye out for in the near future?
We look forward to our upcoming kidult collaboration projects, as well as much exposure expansion on licensing business in China and South Korea. Stay tuned!
