The Smiley Company is a brand licensing company, based in

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

. It holds the rights to the

smiley A smiley, sometimes referred to as a smiley face, is a basic ideogram that represents a smiling face. Since the 1950s it has become part of popular culture worldwide, used either as a standalone ideogram, or as a form of communication, such a ...

face in over 100 countries. The company creates products including textiles, puzzles, party goods, stationery, automobile accessories, and toys for licensed brand partners and retailers.

History

Franklin Loufrani, the owner of the Smiley face

As a journalist, Franklin Loufrani designed a smiley face for the newspaper

France-Soir ''France Soir'' ( en, France Evening) was a French newspaper that prospered in physical format during the 1950s and 1960s, reaching a circulation of 1.5 million in the 1950s. It declined rapidly under various owners and was relaunched as a popul ...

in 1971. The image of the

Smiley A smiley, sometimes referred to as a smiley face, is a basic ideogram that represents a smiling face. Since the 1950s it has become part of popular culture worldwide, used either as a standalone ideogram, or as a form of communication, such a ...

was accompanied with the slogan, ''"Take The Time To Smile."'' It was created as a way to indicate to readers which stories held good news. Before the campaign started, in October 1971, Loufrani registered his smiley face with the French trademark office. While other smiling faces had been used in marketing and advertising elsewhere globally, many of them used terms such as ''"happy face"'' and ''"smiling face."'' Loufrani was the first documented person to use the term ''"smiley."'' By the 1990s, Franklin and his son Nicolas Loufrani held trademarks for the symbol in around 70 countries and had licensed the smiley to brands including Levi Strauss & Co. In 1996, the Loufranis founded the Smiley Company in London, England, built around the Smiley brand. In 1997, Nicolas created hundreds of

emoticon An emoticon (, , rarely , ), short for "emotion icon", also known simply as an emote, is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers, and letters—to express a person's feelings, ...

s, including a 3D smiley logo. His images, registered with the United States Copyright Office in 1997, were first published as GIF files on the internet in 1998, making them the first graphical emoticons used in technology. He launched the SmileyWorld brand shortly thereafter. In the early 2000s, the company licensed the rights to their emoticons to telecom companies, including

Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, i ...

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent public companies, Motorol ...

Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...

, amongst others. Nicolas Loufrani compiled his graphical emoticons, along with other existing images used for communication, into an online dictionary which was divided into categories, and by 2002, the dictionary included over 3,000 images. In 1997, The Smiley Company filed a

trademark A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression that identifies products or services from a particular source and distinguishes them from othe ...

application with the

United States Patent and Trademark Office The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark registration authority for the United States. The USPTO's headquarters are in Alex ...

. In 2001,

Walmart Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores from the United States, headquarter ...

opposed the registration, citing potential confusion between their design and Loufrani's. Nine years later, the USPTO initially sided with

, before another federal court case was brought forward by Smiley in 2009. In 2011, the companies settled out of court. In 2005, the company announced the creation of the Smiley World Association, later renamed Smiley Fund and now Smiley Movement, as a charitable arm of the company, to which it donates 10 percent of its profits. In 2017, the company was responsible for 210 million products, that were sold under partnership and licensing agreements. License Global magazine listed the company as one of the most influential brands of the 2010s in its December 2020 summary of the brands of the decade list. In early 2021, it was announced that The Smiley Company had produced a short film about the history of the

in the run-up to the 50th anniversary since it was created by Franklin Loufrani. Nicolas loufrani

Fashion

In 2007, The Smiley Company setup a design studio in

. The company worked with a number of fashion houses from 2007 onwards, including the Moschino campaign, ''“Smiley for Moschino.”'' In 2017, Smiley partnered with

Crocs Crocs, Inc. (stylized in all lowercase) is an American footwear company based in Broomfield, Colorado, that manufactures and markets the Crocs brand of foam clogs. History Crocs was founded by Lyndon "Duke" Hanson, and George Boedecker Jr. to ...

to create Smiley Jibbitz, charms which could be worn on Crocs. They partnered again in 2021 with a smiley designed croc shoe. By 2022, the fashion division of Smiley Company generated €200 million in sales annually.

Business model

The Smiley Company's

business model A business model describes how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value,''Business Model Generation'', Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, and 470 practitioners from 45 countries, self-published, 2010 in economic, soci ...

was compared to

Peter Drucker Peter Ferdinand Drucker (; ; November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005) was an Austrian-American management consultant, educator, and author, whose writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of the modern business co ...

's theory that corporations could operate with a small team of senior management, with partnerships and outsourcing a major component when bringing products to market. In the book, The Michelangelo Project: Making It in the Digital Century Workforce, author Isabel Wu explained that The Smiley Company deployed a real-world example of Drucker's business theory. Its vast library of images, designs and concepts are then used by other companies to develop and manufacture products.

References

External links

The Smiley Company
official website {{DEFAULTSORT:Smiley Company Branding companies of the United Kingdom Privately held companies of the United Kingdom