Nicolas Loufrani is the CEO of the Smiley Company, an organisation founded by his father, Franklin Loufrani, who continues to serve as the company’s president today. Franklin Loufrani is renowned internationally as the smiley face owner and creator, having made the iconic Smiley logo a globally recognised brand.
Over the years, Nicolas Loufrani created various different versions of the Smiley logo, each with different expressions, which became known as emoticons. His intention was to create a positive, inspiring language that is universally understood, encouraging people all over the world to attend to ‘the birth of a universal language’, his 2001 slogan, when this was still only wishful thinking.
His father, French journalist Franklin Loufrani, created the first Smiley trademark in 1972 as part of a ‘feel good’ media campaign launched across the country in response to negative headlines regarding social and political unrest. For more than 50 years, the Smiley logo has been promoted by Loufrani as a figurehead of various popular culture movements, from free love and raves to the digital revolution.
Launching the world’s first plush toy named Smiley in 1989, Franklin Loufrani applied to register his brand name in several countries, including France and the United States. He subsequently had the foresight to buy back numerous third-party trademarks from various classes of goods and services that had started using the brand name in a completely different context.
Nicolas Loufrani joined the Smiley Company in 1996 and played an important role in helping the company to evolve the traditional concept of licensing. His vision for design and background in the world of luxury were decisive factors in Smiley’s revolution, establishing Smiley as the brand behind a universal language and the first ever IP of the internet era and subculture.
In an interview with Brunch Magazine, Nicolas Loufrani reflected that he sometimes wondered whether he was ‘a visionary or an idiot’, pointing out that if he inherited the Rolling Stones logo, he would not have given himself permission to move the tongue or create a new expression with the lips. Nevertheless, Nicolas Loufrani established SmileyWorld, a library of over 10,000 unique icons providing a mode of communication to billions of users around the world.
Of course, none of this would have been possible without Smiley, Franklin Loufrani’s smiling yellow logo, which is recognised across the planet as a brand of optimism and positivity today. Loufrani’s real genius was to deposit the drawing at France’s National Institute of Industrial Property, transforming his sketch into a profitable brand.
What started in France during the 1970s as a move to raise morale established the concept of happiness as a major consumer trend. According to reports, Franklin Loufrani developed the Smiley graphic after the publication he worked for was approached by Prime Minister Chaban-Delmas, who tasked the newspaper with campaigning for ‘the morale of the French’.
Franklin Loufrani’s simple icon – consisting of a yellow circle, a smile and two dots – has remained as relevant as ever over the decades, embraced as an emblem of positivity and cultural movement.
Following his goal of spreading good news and positivity through the French newspaper France Soir, Franklin Loufrani earned himself the moniker ‘father of the smiley face’, with the graphic frequently used to express emotion today. To build a company around intellectual property in this way demands a huge amount of hard work and creativity, monitoring and adapting to trends, working with the best partners, building a great team and pivoting where necessary.
Following his father’s success with Smiley, Nicolas Loufrani went on to create a ‘Smiley Dictionary’ consisting of many categories of icons, like emotions, sports, celebrities, objects, weather signs, celebrations, food and more. His categorisation was then followed by all tech companies when they created their emojis. His key idea was to replace the ASCII emoticons made of punctuation and started by Scott Fahlman with Smiley graphics that were easier to understand by people all over the world for their simplicity.
To conceive a graphic representation for hundreds of emotions, Nicolas Loufrani worked in front of his mirror, mimicking emotions and imagining the right representation for more conceptual ones. For example, he decided that a round yellow face with hearts in the eyes would represent love or one with sunglasses would mean cool. These representations are now used by billions of people daily. For other categories like objects or food, all icons were using Smiley eyes and mouths, making them funnier but some might say more childish and ‘kawaii’ than the current emojis.
The Smiley Company has inter alia licensed its icons for marketing and merchandising purposes, providing licensing and usage rights to more than 1,000 companies – including Samsung, Motorola and Nokia, who used them on cell phones before the smartphone era – and numerous industries such as food and beverages, fashion, home decor, toys, publishing, health & beauty, automobiles, shopping malls and more. This has made the company enter the top 100 IP brands in the world, currently sitting in the 52nd position according to License Global magazine.