Sanrio Tmall Super Brand Day: 2.3 billion exposures, 35 million GMV, how is a "certainty" growth node forged?

Author | Wang Yi

In August, a long queue formed in front of a train-shaped installation on Hubin Pedestrian Street in Hangzhou.

Some people traveled here specially from other cities, some held their phones to broadcast live, and others queued up while checking strategies on Xiaohongshu. "Take a photo with Hello Kitty at the front of the train first, then collect stamps at check-in points to participate in the lottery! There are exclusive discounts waiting for you at brand booths!"

This is the core installation of the 2026 Sanrio Tmall Super Brand Day offline pop-up, the "Good Friends Special Train".

In the same week, the TVC starring 5 top Sanrio characters with the theme "Good Friends Set Off Together" went viral across the whole network.

In the footage, Hello Kitty, Pompompurin, Cinnamoroll, Kuromi and My Melody board the train with their good friends, heading for different destinations and creating shared memories. The message conveyed by this TVC is that with the company of Sanrio, both ordinary daily life and brand-new journeys are endowed with special meaning.

If you only focus on the immediate performance, this looks like a very conventional large-scale IP marketing campaign: the TVC builds momentum, the pop-up drives traffic, and the Tmall venue sees explosive sales. But looking at a longer timeline, a more noteworthy change has emerged: Sanrio Tmall Super Brand Day is evolving from a "once-a-year sales driving node" into an annual grand event jointly created by "IP holders, licensees and consumers".

01. Three consecutive leaps in three years, a reusable operation node

Let's go back to August 2024.

Sanrio and Alifish jointly operated the first Sanrio Tmall Super Brand Day, with the theme "Good Friends Stay Together". Leveraging the 50th anniversary of Hello Kitty, the two parties gathered more than 30 brands for the carnival. Hello Kitty appeared on the cover of *L'Officiel* for the first time, and an offline party was held in Chengdu.

The performance of the first session was beyond expectations. The sales of Sanrio's official flagship store increased by 600% year-on-year, and the total GMV of co-branded products across all venues exceeded 20 million yuan. This fully proves that Sanrio's fan base in China is large enough to support a consumption node with concentrated explosive growth.

The second Super Brand Day in 2025 delivered clearer results. The theme of this session was "Good Friends Show Together", the number of cooperative brands expanded to more than 50, and the GMV increased by more than 50% year-on-year.

More breakthroughs were reflected in offline scenarios. Shanghai University Road was transformed into a 3,000-square-meter "Ita-Street". During the event, more than 300,000 people came to check in, making it one of the most talked-about city events of the year.

By 2026, the theme of the third session was upgraded to "Good Friends Set Off Together". More than 50 brands participated, and 67 new debut products were launched simultaneously, covering multiple categories such as trendy toys, 3C digital, FMCG, beauty, apparel and home furnishing.

From "Stay Together" to "Show Together" and then to "Set Off Together", the themes form an emotional curve: from building a sense of companionship, to stimulating the desire for expression, and finally issuing an action call. More critical than the emotional curve are three structural changes behind the three years of data.

The first change is on the brand side. More and more licensed brands have participated for three consecutive years and prepared for the event months in advance. For them, Super Brand Day is no longer a marketing event to "give it a try", but a fixed activity that can be included in the annual plan.

The second change is reflected in offline scenarios. From themed parties to core business districts, offline experiences have been upgraded year after year, providing fans with a real space for close contact and in-depth communication. This is an irreplaceable emotional value that online traffic cannot offer, and in turn brings huge traffic to online explosive growth.

The third change comes from the product side. When brands know that a group of Sanrio fans will "wait for the event" every August, they dare to invest their best products and core production capacity in the same node. This is why 67 new debut products were launched intensively this year.

Data shows that at this year's Sanrio Tmall Super Brand Day, the GMV of IP co-branded products exceeded 35 million yuan, and the Hangzhou offline pop-up attracted nearly 3 million check-in visits.

02. What changes has Sanrio Tmall Super Brand Day brought?

Nowadays, the positioning of Sanrio Tmall Super Brand Day has shifted from a "promotion node" to an "annual brand asset accumulation window". Its real industry value lies in a set of reusable paths.

The 2026 implementation is a typical example.

During the preheating period, Tmall developed custom interactive activities such as "collect mileage", "pick up friends" and "draw gifts", attracting more than 100,000 participants.

On Tmall and Taobao APP, searching for "Good Friends Set Off" can directly lead users to the main venue, greatly shortening the path from "being interested" to "placing an order".

The 7-day pop-up of "Good Friends Special Train" in Hangzhou directly converted check-in experiences into brand traffic; the main key visual of the event was displayed on core large screens in first-tier cities, with over 2.35 billion exposures across the whole network.

The IP holder provides image resources and fan base, the platform side provides traffic and transaction scenarios, and Alifish provides operation middle platform capabilities and integrated marketing capabilities. The tripartite collaboration enables Sanrio Tmall Super Brand Day to achieve systematic effects beyond a single collaboration.

But what is more worth analyzing is: why are more than 50 brands willing to launch 67 new products intensively at Sanrio Tmall Super Brand Day? The answers from different brands reveal the differentiated value of IP co-branding in real business scenarios.

First, let's look at the business growth brought to the IP itself.

Two days after the launch, Sanrio Tmall Official Flagship Store quickly ranked Top 3 on the "Hot-selling Animation Peripheral Brand List". The newly launched Modern Holiday series during the event achieved total sales of nearly 2 million yuan. Among them, the spicy girl fur pendant was sold out in 6 seconds after launch, breaking last year's single-product sell-out record.

If the data of Sanrio's official flagship store proves that the IP native festival drives the growth of the copyright holder itself, the performance of licensees verifies the replicability of this model in a broader business ecosystem.

Take Chow Sang Sang, which participated for the third time, as an example.

The gold and jewelry industry features high unit price, long decision-making cycle, and scattered daily sales across nodes throughout the year. Sanrio Tmall Super Brand Day compresses Sanrio's IP popularity, Tmall's traffic, and the brand's new product debut into one time window, forming concentrated release.

The exclusive scarcity and emotional added value of co-branded products change consumers' purchase logic from "I need a necklace" to "I want that Sanrio co-branded necklace", and emotional resonance assists consumption decisions.

At this year's Super Brand Day, Chow Sang Sang Tmall Flagship Store launched two new solid gold pendants and two new Dharma solid gold beads. The Hello Kitty design injects youthful genes into traditional solid gold jewelry, accurately catering to the aesthetic preferences of the new generation of consumers. During the event, the sales of Sanrio IP products increased by 139% year-on-year, and GMV increased by 109% year-on-year. The overall UV of the store increased by 95% year-on-year, and GMV increased by 83% year-on-year. The total sales of three offline linked stores increased by more than 30% year-on-year.

Compared with Chow Sang Sang, SmartDevil presents a different situation. The competition in the mobile phone accessories industry mainly revolves around functional parameters and product prices, but Tmall Super Brand Day provides an exit from the involution for such industries.

In September 2025, SmartDevil and Sanrio cooperated for the first time to launch the "Magic Book Series Privacy Screen Protector". After this category was launched in the flagship store, it was sold out across the whole platform within a week, and the new user acquisition rate on the Taobao system reached 47%.

At this year's Sanrio Tmall Super Brand Day, SmartDevil launched the new product "Sanrio Privacy Screen Protector · Cute Friends Series". During the event, it ranked TOP1 on the "Hot-selling Animation Peripheral Brand List" and TOP8 on the "Anti-reflection Screen Protector Hot-selling List".

Similar to consumers' logic of buying Chow Sang Sang co-branded jewelry, even for categories like "mobile phone screen protector", people's attention has shifted from "which one is cheaper" to "which one I want more". The role of IP co-branding in increasing product prices is evident.

Tissue is a typical low-involvement FMCG category. Consumers rarely actively search for or pay attention to new products; for durable goods such as water cups and fresh-keeping boxes, it is also difficult for them to perceive quality differences. For these categories, people naturally lack brand loyalty and rarely have consumption impulses.

But Sanrio Tmall Super Brand Day changed this situation. During the event, when co-branded tissues or water cups printed with Sanrio images appear in the promotion positions, they are no longer daily necessities waiting to be picked up on the shelves, but "IP peripherals" that fans actively add to their shopping carts.

During the event, Mind Act Upon Mind Official Flagship Store ranked TOP5 on the domestic brand cleaning store list. Lock&Lock also attracted more young consumer groups.

In addition, in the beauty field, the sales of the "Pink Crystal Hair Care Set" gift box in L'Oreal Hair Care Official Flagship Store exceeded 1 million yuan, ranking TOP2 on the "Hot-selling Hair Care Brand List".

THE BEAST Official Flagship Store and tbh THE BEAST Home Flagship Store performed excellently by combining the "Qixi Festival gifting node", with single-day sales exceeding 1 million yuan.

With the traffic support of Sanrio Tmall Super Brand Day and the brand's simultaneous membership activities, Bosideng Children's Clothing Flagship Store achieved full new user acquisition effect, attracting 34,000 new users.

From the above cases, seven brands and eight completely different consumer categories point to the same conclusion: the core value that Super Brand Day brings to licensees is not simple traffic input, but "certainty" — the drainage path of "online content seeding, offline pop-up experience, online sales explosion" has been fully verified.

It is precisely because of this certainty that brands can safely invest resources in this fixed node.

03. Sanrio in China, the second outbreak of a classic IP

Up to this point, the business logic of Sanrio Tmall Super Brand Day is clearly visible.

It takes the mature IP as the traffic anchor, links cross-category licensed brands to jointly promote products, creates marketing events through a series of online and offline interactions, and finally achieves a win-win situation for "IP holders, brand owners and platform parties".

The deeper question is: Why has Sanrio's Tmall Super Brand Day become a new paradigm for IP cooperation? What industry logic behind it is reflected under the deepening of consumption stratification?

In fact, there are many successful cases of IPs cooperating with Tmall Super Brand Day. Most brands rely on the diverse gameplay of Tmall Super Brand Day to achieve simultaneous growth of brand effect and sales through "limited edition or new product debut", "online interaction" and "offline immersive scenarios". But Sanrio Tmall Super Brand Day has achieved a key difference — different role positioning and different cooperation ecology.

The cooperation between other brands/IPs and Super Brand Day basically focuses on a single brand, which is the concentrated outbreak of one Tmall brand flagship store. Sanrio Tmall Super Brand Day, under the organization of Al