Custom Kitty kawaii Uniqlo shirts and bags! Sanrio stamps and more with UTMe! DIY design service

Uniqlo gives us a blank slate/T-shirt to fill up with Hello Kitty cuteness.

Uniqlo makes a whole bunch of T-shirts, but since the T-shirt is the single best-suited article of clothing for self-expression, they still might not have one that’s exactly what you want. Thankfully, the casual clothing chain also offers something called UTMe!

A play on words with Uniqlo’s UT T-shirt line, UTMe! is a service that lets you custom-design your own T-shirt. The coolest part about UTMe! is all of the T-shirt graphic stamps you can choose from, for which Uniqlo partners with popular Japanese character entertainment franchises. So yes, that means that Japan’s hardest-working character, Hello Kitty, is part of the lineup, and our Japanese-language reporter Ninoude Punico set out to see just how cute a Kitty tee she could make.

You can use UTMe! via an in-store terminal, the Uniqlo smartphone app, or the official Uniqlo website. However, not every physical Uniqlo branch has a UTMe! terminal, and at those that do there’s often a wait to use it, so we recommend doing your designing online, especially since regardless of which method you use it’ll take about two to four weeks to print and ship your shirt.

The starting screen of the T-shirt design looks like this, and can be found here.

To get to Kitty-fying, you’ll need to click on the blue-green button marked コラボスタンプを追加, “add collaboration stamp.” This will bring up a list of all the currently available partners, so scroll down until you see Hello Kitty, then click on her.

That’ll actually put you into a sub-menu for all of the various Sanrio stamp sets, from which Punico selected the top one, which is all Kitty-chan stamps.

That brings up a confirmation screen expressly stating that the stamps cost 0 yen to use, as they’re included in the 1,990-yen (US$13) price of the T-shirt.

Click “OK,” and then it’s time to choose your stamps!

As you can see, there are a lot to choose from, and the image above isn’t even all of them. In total, the Hello Kitty set has 40 different stamps, so Punico was extra glad that she was designing her shirt online and could take as much time as she wanted without having to worry about someone else waiting for her to hurry up and finish fiddling with an in-store terminal.

Once you’ve selected a stamp, you can resize, rotate, or drag it around the front of the shirt. Though you can’t use the same stamp more than once (probably to prevent cost-prohibitive patterns of hundreds of identical stamps), you can use as many different stamps in the set as you like, as long as your design fits on the shirt’s front and stamps aren’t overlapping with each other.

▼ The design on the left is OK, but the one on the right isn’t.

But within those rules, there’s plenty of freedom to come up with unique, expressive designs. Punico quickly put together four shirts, then took a long time trying to decide which of the four cute candidates she liked best.

▼ She especially likes the retro ‘80s vibe of these particular illustrations.

In the end, she decided on the strawberry-center pattern, finalized her order, and after two weeks, she had her shirt.

▼ It even comes with a Uniqlo tag, to make it feel extra authentic.

Punico is extremely happy with how well it turned out, playful and colorful, but not so loud or crazy that she can’t pair it with a simple, classy cardigan.

The fit and fabric are great too, which really underscores an advantage UTMe! has over other online T-shirt design options: since it’s a Uniqlo service, as long as you’ve bought/worn one of their T-shirts, you know what to expect it terms of garment quality.

Oh, and while Punico started with a white T-shirt, you can also use a black one for your canvas, and the UTMe! service also allows you to design custom sweatshirts, hoodies, and even cloth tote bags.

▼ Simply select which one you want to design from here.

As you probably noticed in one of the screenshots above, UTMe! has a number of other Sanrio stamp sets, featuring characters like My Melody and Cinamamoroll. However, for any one UTMe! T-shirt, all of the stamps have to come from the same set, so you can’t mix and match. This really isn’t such a bad problem to have, though…

…as Punico has already started scheming up her next T-shirt designs.

Related: UTMe! official website
Photos: SoraNews24
Screnshots: UTMe! official website (1, 2), Uniqlo app
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