In the real world, Hello Kitty was born in Japan in 1974, when a young Tokyo-based company called Sanrio asked designer Yuko Shimizu to invent a cartoon animal who would appeal to the preteen girl in everyone. Sanrio, which already had a bear and a dog (and, curiously, a strawberry) in its growing cast of characters, needed the new critter to decorate a plastic coin purse it was planning to produce.

Shimizu "wanted to create a cat that was kittenish for sure," author Marie Y. Moss writes in the