Brown and LINE FRIENDS

Brown is the deadpan bear at the centre of LINE Friends, the character line built off LINE, the chat app that dominates messaging in Japan and Taiwan. He arrived as a sticker in 2011, paired as a flat foil to Cony, the energetic rabbit, and the two became LINE's most valuable property outside the app itself. The permanently unchanged expression is the joke and the reason he works in a sticker keyboard: you supply the emotion, he supplies the face. LINE built flagship stores around him in Tokyo, Taipei, Shanghai, Chengdu and beyond, with statues taller than the people photographing them, plus Brown and Friends cafes where you eat next to a life size version. Same lesson as Kakao: a sticker pack turned into a hospitality business.