Cactus Friends Hello Kitty

Sanrio, best known for its globally beloved characters like Hello Kitty, My Melody, and Cinnamoroll, has also made a significant impact in the art toy world by blending its signature kawaii aesthetic with designer toy culture. While primarily a mass-market brand, Sanrio has collaborated with various artists, toy designers, and streetwear brands to create limited-edition, collectible figures that appeal to both casual fans and serious art toy collectors. Sanrio has worked with brands like Medicom Toy (BE@RBRICK), Kidrobot, and Mighty Jaxx, as well as artists like Jason Freeny, who has reimagined characters like Hello Kitty in his signature anatomical dissection style. By partnering with brands like BAPE, UNIQLO, and Nike, Sanrio has merged fashion, street culture, and art toys, making its characters more appealing to collectors beyond traditional fans. While Sanrio remains rooted in cute and mainstream appeal, its willingness to explore the art toy space through collaborations and reimaginings has made it a versatile and collectible presence in the designer toy scene.This profile is a mix of all designer toys made by the artists. We may reorganize this profile in the future and an artists that creates their own toys would have a separate manufacturer profile.Simone Legno is the creative director and co-founder of tokidoki. Born in Rome, Italy, Legno, drew incessantly as a child. The boxes of chewed, broken and unsharpened pencils he adored as a kid were the beginnings of a passion for art that led to the eventual creation of tokidoki, Legno’s online portfolio of the same name. tokidoki means “sometimes” in Japanese. Legno, who has always had a deep love of Japan and fascination with world cultures, chose the word because he feels “everyone waits for moments that change one’s destiny, by chance or by meeting a new person”. Simone's special moment arrived when his designs drew the attention of entrepreneurs Pooneh Mohajer and Ivan Arnold, who spied the art on his personal website and convinced him to move to L.A. to start up a dynamic new partnership with them. Simone has been a sought-after speaker around the world at museums, universities and conferences, from MOCA (the Geffen Museum-Los Angeles) to the Adobe MAX conference, UCLA, USC, the Flash Film Festival in San Francisco, Istituto Europeo di Design in Rome, Grafika Manila and many others.Hello Kitty is a globally recognized character created by the Japanese company Sanrio in 1974. Designed by Yuko Shimizu, Hello Kitty (known in Japan as “Kitty White”) is a white anthropomorphic cat with a red bow on her left ear and a simple, cute design that has made her an icon of kawaii culture (the Japanese concept of “cute”). Over the years, Hello Kitty has become one of the most iconic and enduring characters in pop culture, representing not only childhood innocence but also a lifestyle brand that extends across multiple industries.