Brianna Fox-Priest
August 27, 2023 Hello Kitty has collabed with just about every major franchise you could think of and then some. However, there’s one area in which Miss Kitty & Friends have yet to appear in…LEGO. Are you as surprised as we are?!
While it seems like a no-brainer—it’s true—Hello Kitty and LEGO have never collaborated. That is until (hopefully) now. One devoted Hello Kitty super fan and winning LEGO designer has risen up to the challenge. Enter, Ivan Guerrero. Responsible for the winning LEGO Ideas competition 123 Sesame Street set, Guerrero went to the design board again to bring to life a Hello Kitty LEGO set. The designs you are about to see are original mockups from the creative mind of Ivan Guerrero.
LEGO aficionados can try their hand at making their own designs thanks to the LEGO Ideas competition. Ideas is a platform run by LEGO, where fans across the globe can propose new LEGO set designs for the chance that one day they may become actual sets sold on shelves. Each proposed project must be a standout idea, design a full set with only existing LEGO bricks, and receive 10,000 online votes for a chance to become a real, playable design. Once it does, the project is reviewed by experts then LEGO will make the final call to license the set.
In previous years, sets based on Sonic the Hedgehog, BTS, Voltron, and Guerrero’s Sesame Street won a spot on toy and virtual shelves. “I’ve always been a little surprised that Sanrio has never collaborated with LEGO. With Hello Kitty’s 50th anniversary coming, I thought it would be the perfect time to pitch a kawaii LEGO set based on Sanrio,” says Guerrero.
What perfect timing for a special Hello Kitty x LEGO collaboration set if you ask us! A few months back is when Guerrero got to dreaming up and designing this adorable set based on Hello Kitty and her Sanrio pals. Growing up in the Philippines, Guerrero recalls seeing Kitty on “notebooks, lunchboxes, stickers, and pretty much everything available at the old Gift Gate stores.” Throughout her 50 years, Kitty has collaborated with many pop culture icons such as McDonald’s, Nike, and Naruto.
This Hello Kitty exclusive design was built with the intention of honoring Sanrio’s philosophy of “Small Gift, Big Smile”.
Featuring a mini Sanrio Town playset that also acts as kawaii desktop accessories. Included are four mini buildings: Hello Kitty’s Café, Keroppi’s Mini Mart, My Melody’s Gift Shop, and Badtz-Maru’s Arcade. Each is able to open up and reveal tiny shops filled to the brim with many hidden Easter eggs that fans will immediately recognize. Characters such as Tuxedo Sam, Little Twin Stars, Pompompurin, Chococat, and Gudetama can be spotted inside. The full set is shown in the design to come with the mini-figures of Hello Kitty, Badtz-Maru, Keroppi, My Melody, Kuromi, and Cinnamoroll.
“While the set is a little bit inspired by the show Hello Kitty and Friends: Supercute Adventures, it pays tribute to the long history of these characters, with callbacks to their very first appearances on vintage Sanrio products. For instance, the Hello Kitty Cafe doubles as a coin bank that mimics Hello Kitty’s debut appearance in 1974 on a count purse. I really tried to dig in deep for my references.”
If you’d like to see this dream Hello Kitty x LEGO set become a reality, check out the voting page for the project here.
