Hello Kitty Con and Hello Frustration

I attended Hello Kitty Con on Saturday with my friend, Nora.

The day following the announcement in June, I purchased tickets purposefully for Saturday, November 1, thinking booking the day of Hello Kitty's birthday would prove to special - especially since it's Hello Kitty's BIG 40th ANNIVERSARY Birthday! After taking off of work early in San Francisco on Friday after the World Series Parade, I flew into Los Angeles in the late evening to celebrate a light Halloween so that I could attend Hello Kitty Con the following day. Oops, we went to bed at 5 am.


After wrestling myself out of bed in the morning, Nora and I rolled into Little Tokyo. Nora asked me to explain my love for Hello Kitty on our walk to the Convention.  It's not easy to put into words. My love for Hello Kitty is ingrained - my love for HK is like my love for reading.

We got our IDs, we got our little booklets, and it was the beginning of the end.

I thought that Hello Kitty Con would be a quest in acquiring cute Hello Kitty stickers. Instead, Nora and I found ourselves trapped in a Sisaphean cycle of lines. We waited in line to get inside the overhang. In order to get inside the convention center, we got into another line. Inside, the space was a display of knick-knacks, many of which I owned. Raised about the convention center was the merchandise store, which to my and Nora's dismay was only able to reached after three to four hours of lines. Nora and I walked around looking at each exhibit, taking photos with random Hello Kitties.

We had to stand in line in order to take this picture:

Nora and I trapped in the extra large replica of the Hello Kitty coin purse that started it all

Here are some other photos of Nora and me posing next to random Hello Kitties, that we had to wait in line for:

Click to Enlarge!

After about three hours of waiting in lines, Hello Kitty Con shut down the merchandise acquisition (store!) line at 3 pm. With no notice in the program, my one day access to sold out Hello Kitty Con was pretty much over.

For a convention that's all about a kitty that got its start from being on a coin purse, the lack of access for someone who flew to Los Angeles for 24 hours to attend the convention where I would be able to add to my lifetime collection of Hello Kitty thing was disappointing. 

If Sanrio is going to be putting a piece of merch on display like the Hope Diamond, I'd hope that you would focus the convention on the attendees, those superfans who are present to acquire more merchandise. 

Hope Diamond? Pretty much!

It's my personal opinion as a lifetime lover of Hello Kitty that the whole convention was overbooked, and the ratio of museum style exhibit to store and purchase availability should have been flipped. Side note: when Hello Kitty Con said Marketplace, I thought Supermarket Place - just like in Asia, where you can get Hello Kitty anything inside a Supermarket. Silly me.

My favorite photo other than the first photo I posted, is this one, which is actually from the Japanese Heritage Museum!

Kawaii!

At the Japanese Heritage Museum, Nora and I discovered how many apples tall we are. I discovered that I'm the same height in apples as I am in beers. We saw more merch that I own, including backpacks from 2000-2014, and delicious and yummy bubble gum. The only thing that I would love to be able to rent is a Hello Kitty robot.

Farewell, Hello Kitty Con. You were so cute but so frustrating. I left Hello Kitty Con with a Loungefly HK pencil case and a Loungefly Hello Kitty lunch box. Other than a birthday gift with purchase at Sephora, no special events were held for Hello Kitty's birthday. All the activities that required tickets were out of tickets.

I left Hello Kitty Con with no stickers, no official merch and many disappointments. Like a paper with a poor thesis, Hello Kitty started with a good idea, but had no legs to stand on. Improve, please!

 #hellokittycon #hkcon #hellokitty