Cute Fruit

Cute food-themed designs and characters are currently in fashion within the licensed products landscape, thanks to a number of driving forces:

• Collectible toys. Moose Toys’ Shopkins and MGA’s Num Noms have been showing strength in both in their core playthings and in their licensed brand extensions. Kid Robot’s plush-based Yummy World is another example.
• Emojis. Unicode and Creative Commons emoji sets used by Apple, Google, Twitter, and the like include food icons such as honey pots, clinking beer mugs, and peaches to convey various sentiments. Products tied to the leading emoji-based licensed properties, including Emoji: The Official Brand and Smiley, do as well.
• Mobile games. The rise of properties such as King’s Candy Crush and Halfbrick’s Fruit Ninja predated the popularity of today’s collectible- and emoji-related brands, and playing the games became pop-culture crazes. Although not all mobile merchandise programs have been resounding successes, some licensed products tied to both of these properties are still on the market.
• Asian kawaii. Cute Asian properties (known as kawaii), especially those from Japan, China, and Korea, often feature foods as central characters or themes, whether they have their roots in products, digital communications, or television. Properties such as Cotton World from Korea have a presence in kawaii-leaning specialty shops in the U.S., while Yi Animation from China, with its film Kung Food, is among those pitching entertainment content and IP to the global market. While many of these have not gained wide followings in the U.S., Asian kawaii style has influenced artists, animators, and marketers.

All of these developments have contributed to consumers’ appetite for cute fruits, veggies, burgers, milkshakes, and the like, licensed or otherwise. The graphics are featured on products from bedding to boots, with a focus on the girls’ and young women’s markets.

Reminder: Tomorrow’s Raugust Communications e-newsletter (Tuesday, November 15) takes a look at the lifespan of hot categories and properties. If you’re not a subscriber to this free publication, sign up here. Catch up on past Licensing Trends of the Month, first published in the e-newsletter, here.