The Story Of The Smiley Company

There’s a brand behind the fluorescent smiley face that dominated the 90s rave scene, prudently named The Smiley Company. Now, after decades of running it as a licensing and merchandising company, its founder’s son and self-styled ‘beloved leader’ has set his sights on greater things for the company.

Rich in both heritage and purpose, the Smiley story is one most brands would kill for. 45 years ago Franklin Loufrani developed a promotion on a French newspaper France Soir to highlight positive news by putting a little smiley face next to the print title’s happier stories. He went on to trademark the icon and form The Smiley Company to handle its licensing and merchandising opportunities.

These operations pottered on until the 90s when Loufrani’s son Nicholas officially joined the business with a mind to shake things up.

“My idea was to bring more life to that logo,” he told The Drum. “I was fed up of it – I had seen it since I was born and I wanted to create something new. I started creating a 3D rendering of that flat logo, and from that 3D rendering I started developing lots of different emotions.

“The Smiley started winking, poking the tongue out, laughing out loud, and I also started developing lots of different categories. Smiley became a character to identify different countries for instance. These Smileys became new properties for us. I realised my Smileys should replace these text emoticons and that they should be the new universal language that everybody could recognise.”

Loufrani’s recollections sound altogether like an eerie prediction of what would later become the Unicode emoji keyboard. But at the time, toying with the original Smiley logo was a big risk to take.

“I could say maybe I was visionary – maybe I foresaw the need for Smileys,” he said. “Maybe it was because I was just wanted to have fun and maybe I was completely stupid.

“Back in the day my father thought I was really stupid, we had a big argument in our office – he said: ‘You’re crazy, it’s a trademark, you can’t touch it’.”

Subscribe & Follow The Drum

YouTube:    / thedrumreel  
Website: http://www.thedrum.com/
Facebook:   / thedrumpage  
Twitter:   / thedrum  
Instagram:   / thedrummag  
Pinterest:   / thedrum