CEO Nicolas Loufrani Explains the Smiley Company’s Largest Ever Expansion Plan
By Gary Symons
TLL Editor in Chief
Sure, the world may be going through a tough time, between a series of catastrophic wars, a recent pandemic, and looming threats to democracy, but Nicolas Loufrani says there’s still a lot to smile about.
In fact, the CEO of The Smiley Company argues there’s never been a more important time to accentuate the positive, spread good news, and of course, remember to smile.
“You can always focus on the negative, and that will take you in a negative direction,” Loufrani says. “My approach is, let’s focus on happy, positive news, because if we give positive news to people, if they have something positive in their mind, they’re going to interact more positively with people around them.”
This year, more than a half-century after Loufrani’s father, the French newspaper columnist Franklin Loufrani, first trademarked the Smiley emoji as a trademark, The Smiley Company is undertaking what may be its largest and most ambitious expansion.
Loufrani, an energetic man whose passion comes out in bursts of rapid-fire, French-accented speech, is determined to carry out his father’s legacy of spreading happiness and positivity. It’s not that Loufrani wants people to ignore the very real problems in the world, but rather to focus on hopeful solutions, rather than on hopeless despair.
For that reason, The Smiley Company is massively expanding its reach by launching multiple new brands, each of them designed for a different target audience.
In addition to the current Smiley World brand, the company will be launching ‘Smiley Wink’, which is aimed at Generation X; SW Smiley, aimed at a hip younger crowd defined by pop culture notes of hip hop and graffiti art; Mini Smiley for children up to 4-years-old; and Newmoji, a new set of emoticons that feature 3D realism and are designed for use in online communication.
In addition, Smiley has also launched Future Positive, a program funded by The Smiley Company that will help people complete projects that further 17 specific sustainable development goals.
The expansion is notable for the licensing industry, as Smiley is already considered one of the top 100 licensors in the world today, with approximately a half-billion dollars in annual licensing revenue, based on the more than 3,000 original and proprietary emoticons.
“Using positivity to create more positivity in people is what my father believed in, and it was his vision to help people and to help the world,” Loufrani says. “You know this experiment they did on Facebook, I think it was around 2012, where they were feeding news to about 600,000 of their members.
“Some of them they were feeding with positive news and some with negative news, and they found that the type of news that people were seeing in their feed was impacting the tone of the status they were publishing,” Loufrani explains. “Feed them with negative news and they would write more negative status posts on their Facebook account.
“It was a real-life social study proving that my father’s idea was right.”
To understand where Smiley is going, it’s worth looking back at where the company came from.
The first known smiley face icons were actually created in the 1950s and millions of pins were sold over the following decade, but it was Franklin Loufrani who was first to register the smiley as a trademark, taking ownership of the symbol as a corporate brand.
Loufrani’s work background included journalism, advertising and—crucially—licensing. Around the same time Loufrani, fed up with the constant stream of bad news about the Vietnam War, Watergate and the threat of nuclear war, had pitched the idea of a column to the French newspaper France-Soir.
The column,Prenez le Temps de Sourire (Take the Time to Smile), was a hit, and also included an image of his trademarked Smiley face. Loufrani soon began licensing the image to other companies for various products, starting with an iron-on decal that could be added to T-shirts. Later he signed a deal with Mars, who imprinted the image on chocolates, and then with Levis,who patched the smiley face on their jeans.
Over the ensuing half-century the business of branding the Smiley Face emoticons has grown rapidly, and much of that is due to son Nicolas Loufrani deciding to create a vast library of emoticons, all of them trademarked, which can be applied to virtually any product.
Flashing back to 1997, the internet was just gaining its feet, and the spread of email, text messages and social media created the need for new and innovative ways to effectively communicate not just facts, but also emotional responses.
It was the younger Loufrani who really cemented the company’s future, as he took the time to painstakingly create and trademark more than 3,000 emoticons with a vast array of expressions that could be easily used as a sort of emotional shorthand for internet users. As we all know, emoticons are now at the heart of our daily communication, used literally millions of times every day.
For almost 30 years Smiley’s portfolio of emoticons, combined with a large and talented team of marketing and design specialists, has driven its business to new heights.
Loufrani says the secret to the company’s success is not just the image, but rather their attitude.
“I think we are unique in the sense that we are not an entertainment company, and we’re not a manufacturer whose brands are based on things they’ve produced, like Hello Kitty or Paul Frank, for example,” Loufrani says. “I think we’re the first example of a major, global brand that is entirely based on the concept of brand values and design.
“It is a hard road to travel, honestly, but I think we survive and prosper because we are constantly anticipating the next trends, and also because we have an amazing team of thinkers and designers who are the heart of Smiley,” he adds. “We invest heavily in the best people because our core goal is to really service and support our licensees. We want to provide them with the best product designs, with incredible marketing campaigns, and the result is that our partners succeed and we succeed.”
But with a half-century under its belt, Loufrani says he and Smiley came to realize that major changes were needed to expand the company’s relevancy as new generations have grown up, with their own culture, music, and social attitudes.
“Most other brands are entertainment driven,” Loufrani points out. “So, if there’s a movie, they have to make as much money as they can for six months, or if it’s a cartoon series, that might generally last five to seven years, but most will last two or three years, and that just doesn’t work for us.
“We’ve been in business for 51 years as the same brand, so we need to have a sustainable business and to do that, you have to reinvent yourself every season!,” Loufrani argues. “You’re literally starting from scratch every year, so you have to consider how you’re going to seduce your audience and your trade partners, and how you’re going to remain relevant to these new generations of people.”
Sustainable Licensing: Smiley Gives The Planet Something to Smile About
That, he says, has led to the massive expansion of the Smiley brands being undertaken this year.
“In the case of SW Smiley, it all started by creating a new style of iconography,” Loufranis says. “Instead of keeping the ‘old school’ mouth the way it was drawn when my father first launched it, we’ve really lined the mouth with a more symmetric style, straight lines and a thicker outline. It’s more ‘street’, more modern, and based on that first one, we’ve started developing hundreds of icons in that style.
“I mean, some people might think, ‘hey, it’s just another Smiley face’, but it’s an earth-changing style, sort of like going from the 1928 Mickey Mouse to the 1950’s Mickey.”
The Newmoji project is a much more radical departure for Smiley, and really has little resemblance to the classic Smiley World icons. The Newmoji icons were first conceived and drawn around the time the COVID-19 pandemic began, and Smiley opted to delay the launch and focus on the core business and the company’s 50th anniversary.
Instead, Newmoji was unveiled publicly for the first time at the 2024 Licensing Expo.
“Newmoji was really about modernizing the art direction of what you currently see on some tech platforms in terms of avatars and emojis, but making this more interesting and more relevant to the graphic design trends of today,” Loufrani says. “We did a lot of focus groups and surveys in many different countries, and with different age groups.
“What we found out is that adults reacted very well to hyper-realistic art, and so we have created an entire iconography that is based on hyper-realistic art that looks like real humans with different facial expressions, or dancing the tango, having a bath and so on, to illustrate all those words or concepts.”
The company’s research also helped in designing the icons for Mini Smiley, Loufrani says.
“For kids, we found out that what they like is the quality that they see in modern 3D movies, like Pixar films, where you have high-quality animation,” he explains.
Mini Smiley is a different type of business for Smiley. While this division also features its own iconography based on what today’s children identify with, the focus is on creating characters, animated films, and music that appeals to children under four-years-old.
Key Smiley icons are featured in the iconography for the Mini Smiley brand, but those icons, such as the sun or moon, have different and more childish proportions and rosy cheeks to create icons that grab kids’ attention.
“By introducing new characters and engaging content, we’re able to extend our reach and appeal to younger demographics, while still maintaining the unique and sophisticated design style that The Smiley Company is known for.”
Additionally, Mini Smiley also includes an animated sing-along video series created with the children’s animation studio PGS Entertainment, and available on YouTube at@minismileyworld. At the time of publication, there are already 42 episodes on the YouTube channel, with another 10 expected before the end of the year.
In addition to these three new brands for Smiley, the company also undertook last year the launch of a major initiative that puts the company’s values into action, called ‘Future Positive’.
Loufrani says the idea is to help create a better world by embracing the United Nations’ sustainability goals.
“The mantra at Smiley is to focus on the positive, but that also means you need to take action,” Loufrani says. “It’s not just a bunch of talk. We think it’s important to help create the better world we want to live in, so that means we as a company have to work on things like sustainability. We know pollution and especially climate change are serious issues, so we’re not going to try to pretend it’s not a big deal. It is a big deal, and so we are in this for the long term, and we’ll try to improve every year.”
For that reason, the Future Positive initiative includes a partnership with the United Nations to deliver the goals under UN-SDG Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production.
The company is working to create all of its products in a more sustainable way with fewer and more environmentally materials, and taking action on reducing greenhouse gases related to its business.
A major part of putting a Smiley face back on Planet Earth is the Smiley Future Positive Creator’s Fund. Now in its third season, the fund has banked £500,000 to assist cutting edge designers in creating more ethical, responsible and sustainable to design, sourcing and manufacturing.
This year, the Future Positive Creators Fund supports an inspiring group of designers, including Saul Nash, Christian Cowan, and Theophilio.
Christian Cowan, renowned for his high-octane glamour and wearable designs, and Theophilio, celebrated for bold, culturally-infused creations using upcycled materials, join Saul Nash, whose innovative approach to design continues to push the boundaries of sustainability and style. Their contributions to New York Fashion Week, incorporating Smiley’s sustainability ethos, promise to showcase the potential of sustainable fashion, while continuing to drive positive change within the industry.
Smiley has also created the ‘Butterfly Mark’ to reflect membership in its Positive Luxury program, which is awarded only to brands hat meet higher standards for people and nature. The program is already working directly with more than 170 brands known as the Real Changemakers who have committed to meeting higher standards for both environmental sustainability and ethical practices.
“Our motto and our mantra is to encourage positivity and to put a smile on people’s faces,” Loufrani says. “But just talking is not enough. If you want to see positive change in the world, it’s something you have to work at, and at our heart, that is what Smiley is all about.”