Husband and wife team Charlie and Urania Chien weren’t sure what kind of traffic to expect when they sent their Hello Kitty truck back out into the world after a four-month hiatus.
What they got were three- to four-hour-long lines in Washington D.C. and San Antonio, as fans waited to buy exclusive merchandise like cookies, cups and apparel, and bond over their love for all things Hello Kitty.
“It’s an event for people with like-minded fandom to get together and have a good time,” said Urania, who along with her husband and Allan Tea, the owner of Capital Seafood Dim Sum at the Irvine Spectrum Center, run the Hello Kitty Cafe Truck and Hello Kitty Grand Cafe.
The Orange County trio’s operations include two trucks, one for the East Coast and the other for the West Coast.
There’s also the cafe at the Irvine Spectrum, plus a more recently launched online shop that rolled out in April.
The concept’s popularity and successes—pre- and post-pandemic—have been in the in-real-life experiences. Loyal fans will sometimes begin queuing up as early as 3 a.m.—Charlie’s seen it—to nab limited edition product.
That kind of dedication is not limited to the trucks.
Tea, who handles the cafe component of the business, said he’ll often see fans traveling from San Diego or even Northern California.
The Japanese cartoon character’s fanbase span generational lines.
Allan Tea was able to open an outdoor patio area in July for dining when in-restaurant service was not allowed in Orange County, resuming the afternoon tea and evening cocktails.
“When we first opened in July, the numbers were definitely off,” Tea said. “It was slow in the beginning and there was still a lot of uncertainty, but as we remained opened we definitely saw a lot more traffic coming in. People are coming out.”
There’s been consideration of opening more of the brick-and-mortar concept, Tea said, but no concrete plans at the moment. To date, the group’s done pop-ups in places such as San Diego, San Jose and the Inland Empire, and the temporary format may be something they stick with.
Landing the License
The three business owners idea for the business started nearly a decade ago at Capital Seafood, where the Chien family would frequent and they ended up bonding over dim sum with Tea.
The couple had the idea of pursuing the Hello Kitty Cafe license, and later approached Tea for help with the food and operations side.
The Chiens first saw the Hello Kitty food concept on a trip to Taiwan to introduce relatives to their daughter, who was a little over a year old at the time.
It’s safe to say Urania, a self-described Hello Kitty super fan, was more than excited to see the cafe concept.
“On the 14-hour flight there, I was reading all these saved [Hello Kitty] blogs,” she said.
The Taiwan concept was focused more on diner-style fare, serving burgers and pastas. They realized their interpretation would be one that was more a European-inspired coffee and pastry concept, if they could just be granted the license.
The two would go on to spend the next five years emailing and cold calling people at Sanrio Inc., the Japan-based owners of Hello Kitty and other similar characters, or anyone they thought could help them get the license.
“We were pretty foolish, I guess. We just put our heads down and kept charging. We felt strongly that it would be a huge fan edition,” Charlie said.
Hello Kitty is one of the world’s largest media franchises; formed in 1974 it is estimated to have brought in more than $80 billion in sales over its history.
Retail Successes
Being stubborn served them well. Someone at Sanrio finally heard them and they were offered the chance to first test a truck, which launched in 2014 at Hello Kitty Con in downtown L.A. during Hello Kitty’s 40th anniversary.
The three remember having the truck all set up for the VIP preview night.
“People walked right by us. They thought we were just a prop,” Charlie said. “We looked at each other like, ‘Oh, man. This is going to be a problem.’”
On day one of the convention, as customers began buying a three-piece Hello Kitty donut set, they became walking billboards for the truck outside as other attendees saw the donut box and excitedly asked where it came from.
“It spread just like that and then all of a sudden, they started lining up,” Charlie said.
As the first truck went on to travel, the owners realized they needed another set of wheels. The second truck rolled out in late 2015, followed—finally—by the opening of the Hello Kitty Grand Cafe in Irvine in September 2018.
Part of the three’s successes have been their understanding of retail’s shifts the past few years. The frenzy around Hello Kitty from fans already showed there was a built-in fan base in the U.S. to buy the merchandise.
Offering something more, in the form of bringing Hello Kitty to life via food, just seemed like the next logical step.
And Urania said she sees the trend bear out all the time with customers as they wait in line outside the trucks. They’ll start chatting with one another eventually exchanging Instagram handles to remain in touch.
“How do humans connect?” Charlie said. “Humans usually connect through food and we felt like this [cafe concept] is a major missing thing [stateside]. The world has turned to experiences. We can offer an experience and we can offer [merchandise] and we can offer food.”
