Sanrio has tried to keep Hello Kitty up to the times: sensing a move away from Japan’s love affair with the cute, or “kawaii” aesthetic, it has pushed an edgier look for the cat in the last three years, using as much black as pink.

Sanrio也尝试过让Hello Kitty跟上时代潮流，比如说，在过去三年里，Sanrio在设计时已经减少了一些日本人所偏爱的“卡哇伊”的成分，多用黑色，就像以往使用粉色一样频繁，这样就使得Kitty猫的形象更加出位。

Still, a sense of crisis is evident at the Tokyo offices of Sanrio, where 30 designers, led by Ms. Yamaguchi, are charged with developing new characters. At periodic product meetings, each designer presents as many as 20 characters for consideration by Ms. Yamaguchi. Of those, perhaps a dozen are chosen for trial sales at a pilot Sanrio store in Tokyo.

但是Sanrio的东京办公处仍然弥漫着危机四伏的气息。以山口为首的30人的设计团队，正在努力开发新的卡通形象。在例会上，每个设计师都会提交多达20个卡通形象，供山口筛选。这当中可能会选出12个，在Sanrio位于东京的试点商店进行销售，测试市场反应。

These days, designers are also urged to make sure their characters work across multiple media — a lesson Sanrio learned the hard way with Hello Kitty. Because Kitty had no mouth, it was difficult for the cat to break into television animation, depriving Sanrio of a lucrative source of revenue.

Sanrio还要求设计者们构思新形象时，能够确保新形象可以通过多种媒体进行推广——这是Sanrio在Hello Kitty身上吸取的教训。Kitty猫没有嘴巴，不能说话，也就与电视动画无缘，从而断了Sanrio公司的一条重要财路