GLOBAL EMPIRE HAS £400M-A-YEAR TO SMILEY ABOUT
But the man credited with designing the happy face symbol sold it for a paltry £36
ASMILE costs nothing, as annoying people love to tell us when we’re down in the dumps. But when it comes to the ubiquitous Smiley face symbol, they couldn’t be more wrong.
The bright yellow circle with two oblong eyes and a wide black grin became a symbol of the free-love Sixties, the rave scene of the Eighties, and now it’s a classic emoji. But the symbol comes at quite a price.
The Smiley face is at the centre of a £400million-a-year empire and is licensed to a host of top brands from high fashion labels such as
Fendi, Gucci, Dior, and Moschino, to high-street names like H&M,TopMan and Lee jeans.
Others that have stumped up for the Smiley feelgood factor include CocaCola, McDonald’s, VW, Nivea, Clinique and Nutella. There are Smiley sweets, toys, games, clothing, mugs, Rubik’s Cubes, backpacks, bedding and drinks. You can even tuck into Smiley chicken nuggets.
It’s an extraordinary success story for the London-based brand. For the Smiley Company is raking it in, charging royalties of up to 10 per cent of an item’s sale price.
However, try using the happy little
logo without permission, and the firm’s lawyers will wipe the smile off your face PDQ. And it has a dark history with more than a few tears. The famed yellow icon was originally created by American graphic artist Harvey Ball for the State Mutual Life Assurance bank in Massachusetts in 1963, to boost morale for staff after a merger. “I made a circle with a smile for a mouth on yellow paper, because it was sunshiny and bright,” Ball said in an interview before his 2001 death. “You can take a compass and draw a perfect circle and make two perfect eyes as neat as can be, or you can do it freehand and have some fun with it – like I did. Give it character.” Ball took 10 minutes to draw his smiley face. He was paid $45 (£36) and never saw another penny from it. Smiling face symbols are hardly new, of course. They have been found on 3,700-year-old Hittite pottery in what is now Turkey, and carved into ancient stones.
But Ball is widely acknowledged as the modern era’s Smiley face origina
‘We think of ourselves as a lifestyle brand. We want to be present in different aspects of a consumer’s life’
tor. Crucially neither he nor the bank trademarked his design.
Seven years later, brothers Murray and Bernard Spain, who owned greeting card shops in Pennsylvania, US, copyrighted a slightly different version of Ball’s Smiley face, with symmetrical eyes and grin, above the phrase “Have a Nice Day”.
They produced mugs, T-shirts, bumper stickers and sold more than 50 million Smiley badges.
“Our only desire was to make a buck,” admitted Murray. “But when it became accepted as a symbol of happiness, we were thrilled.”
The Spain brothers were not alone in marketing the Smiley face. French journalist Franklin Loufrani used his version of it to identify “good news” stories in the France-Soir newspaper.
He trademarked his Smiley face in France in October 1971, and began licensing the image to firms from confectioner Mars to jeans company Levi Strauss.
“You could say there was a social meaning behind what he did, but it was really a commercial act,” says Loufrani’s son, Nicolas, 49, who now runs his father’s Smiley Company. “He wanted to make money on it.”
Franklin, now aged 76, aggressively marketed his simple Smiley face worldwide, winning the battle of the Smiley faces, defeating the Spain brothers’ version.
With each generation the Smiley face rode waves of fashion, ebbing in and out of style.
A flower power symbol of the Sixties, it was ambushed by the commercial world in the Seventies, and in the Eighties became the rebellious face of the rave scene. One of the latter’s favourite DJs, Fatboy Slim, also known as Norman Cook, is a passionate Smiley collector. He has Smiley cuff links, paintings, models, watches, jewellery, plus a Smiley tattoo.
“It’s never quite been in fashion, but it’s never gone out of fashion either,” he says.
“Every now and then some designer will take it on and try to make it fashionable, but it’s always been a bit goofy and stupid.”
After falling out of fashion in the Nineties, the Smiley face has been enjoying a comeback, bouncing back into fashion with an ironic post-modernism.
It has also often been subverted. Grunge rock band Nirvana created a stoned version with a wavering smile and Xs for eyes, while British street artist Banksy gave images of riot police yellow Smiley faces.
Throughout it all the Smiley Company flourished, and by 1997, when it launched its first emoticons for computers, the precursor to mobile phones’ emojis, it was hauling in £80million a year.
“Smiley is the original creator of internet graphic emoticons since 1997 and licensed globally to over 800 companies since then,” says its website.
Well, not quite. The first Smiley face in ASCII text – :-) – was created by computer scientist Scott Fahlman in 1982. Another white smiling face emoji was introduced in 1992 for the Unicode character coding system.
BUT THAT hasn’t stopped the Smiley Company from aggressively defending its copyright in all versions of the brand.
“The Smiley Company not only protects our original logo, but also our icons and various characters,” states its website. “Smiley has the right to 3,000 emoticons.
“In 2015 we undertook 138 legal actions which resulted in the destruction of hundreds of thousands of products.
“We will seize infringement products at borders, in warehouses and from stores, in order to protect our properties through our global enforcement network.”
The Smiley Company gained trademarks for its brand in more than 100 countries. In nations where the Smiley face was already trademarked, it either bought the rights or battled in court.
A fight for ownership of the icon
in America pitted the Smiley Company in a bruising 10-year legal battle against superstore goliath Walmart, which used the Smiley face in stores and ads. The unsmiling rivals finally settled out of court in 2011, each agreeing to let their duelling Smiley faces co-exist.
As the Smiley face has gone from a symbol of peace and love to one of pure capitalism, it has naturally attracted its share of piracy and copycats.
“Counterfeit is the ransom on success,” says Nicolas Loufrani. “Duplicates and fakes exist. We work with partners to ensure that whatever is sold through organised retail is authentic.”
The Smiley Company is now one of the world’s 125 top licensing brands, and growing as its yellowfaced superstar routinely appears on the catwalks of Paris and Milan.
But it’s more than just a happy face, insists Nicolas Loufrani.
“We think of ourselves as a lifestyle brand,” he says. “We want to be present in different aspects of the consumer’s life.
“We are basically reaching out to people who see the bright side of life.”
As for Smiley face creator Harvey Ball – who thankfully was not buried in a Smiley face coffin – he had no regrets about the millions he smiled away.
“Hey,” he said, “I can only eat one steak at a time.” :)