2023-06-30 20:26:22
Santiago Vanegas Maldonado
It’s everywhere on social networksWe send and receive hundreds of them through messaging apps, and they are in products that range from stress balls to sponges for washing dishes and pills containing illegal substances.
Sure, the two black dots and the curved line are an abstraction of a smiling human face. And they are a representation of happiness.
But today they are also the main asset of a company that invoices some of $500 million a year.
But who was the mind behind this design icon? How did such a simple idea turn into a thriving business? And how did it end up in the hands of someone other than its original creator?
The origin of the icon
More or less abstract smiling human faces have been drawn for thousands of years.
But, although it has been a controversial matter, today it is more or less clear that the first to design the famous ideogram of the happy face was the American artist and designer Harvey Ball.
He did so in 1963 at the request of Jack Adam, vice president of an insurance company in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Adam asked Ball to create an image to improve employee morale at a time when the company was going through a time of uncertainty.
Ball, who died in 2001, said that it took him only 10 minutes to create it and he was paid US$45.
Worcester Historical MuseumBall enlisted in the US Army during World War II.
The executive director of the Worcester Historical Museum, William Wallace, explains that the characteristic elements of the smiley face created by Ball are the bright yellow background, the perfect circular shape and a slight asymmetry in the eyes and mouth.
“I had to make a decision… Do I use a compass to draw the smile and the perfect colon for the eyes? …Nah, do it freely. Give it some personality”Ball explained what was said.
His design began to be used on the plates of State Mutual, the insurance company.
The response from State Mutual employees and customers to the first batch of 100 caps was so enthusiastic that They began to be produced in batches of 10,000.
In just two years, the smiley face badges had transcended the insurance company and were worn by everyone from flight attendants to nuns.
the claim to fame
Getty Images The singer Glen Campbell with the actress Lucie Arnaz in an American television show in 1971 with happy faces in the background.
In 1967, David Stern, a Seattle publicist, discovered smiley face plates in New York, and used the idea for a campaign for University Federal Savings & Loan bank.
for that campaign nearly half a million badges with the smiley face were printed, according to Stern. It was a key step in its definitive popularization.
But it is not until it arrives in Philadelphia, at the hands of the brothers Bernard and Murray Spain, that the little face becomes a valuable asset.
The Spains redesigned it into a pizza box and put it on all kinds of objects: cards, posters, t-shirts, cups, lamps and a long etcetera.
They were no longer interested in using the smiley face to sell insurance or loans, but instead they sold the face itself.
And since neither Ball nor Stern, nor the Worcester insurer, nor the Seattle bank had bothered to obtain the copyright to the smiley face, the brothers took advantage of that loophole.
They registered the little face next to the phrase Have a happy day (“Ten un día Feliz”).
On their behalf, he made it to the pages of the magazine The New Yorker in 1970 and to the cover of Mad Magazine in April 1972.
It was a phenomenon merchandaising.
They made $2 million in just a couple of years when the business took off in the early 1970s.
Harvey Ball, the original creator, was not interested in claiming copyright.
In a conversation with historian William Wallace, Ball said that when he saw the little face in The New Yorker, he knew he had done something that had captured the imagination of the world.
The millionaire Smiley Company
Getty Images Nicolas Loufrani, CEO of The Smiley Company, at Paris Fashion Week 2018.
In 1971 he added to the complex history of this popular symbol Franklin Loufrania French journalist from the newspaper France Eveningwho used a face quite similar to that of Harvey Ball to point out the positive news.
loufrani, who assured that it was he who invented itwas aware of the economic potential of the little face. He was the first to register it as a trademark.
With the brand to his name, Loufrani gave up journalism and founded The Smiley Company.
His strategy to popularize the smiley in France consisted of giving out 10 million stickers to university students.
Before long, they were on utility poles and cars across the country. Were immediate cultural success.
In the mid-70s, Loufrani and The Smiley Company began closing million-dollar deals with brands that wanted to put a face on their products like Levi’s and Bonitos, the European precursors of M&M’s.
The 80s are golden for Loufrani’s company. And by the 90s, he had already registered the smiley face in more than 70 countries (Today The Smiley Company has the logo registered in about 100).
In 1996, he handed over control of the company to his son, Nicolas, who a year later took the step that would make the face an integral part of digital communication: designed hundreds of emoticons with different smiley expressions.
Its emojis were the first graphic representations of what was previously done with characters such as colons and parentheses.
Today the company does not earn anything from the use of emoticons on phones and the Internet. “It escaped us commercially, but we are happy to have managed to be at the origin of a new language,” Loufrani Jr. told Europe 1 in 2016.
According to Smithsonian magazine, Nicolas Loufrani has said that the design of the smiley it is so simple that no person can claim to have created it. The Smiley Company website goes on to say that it was Franklin Loufrani who created it.
The dispute with Walmart
Getty Images Walmart is the company that bills the most per year worldwide.
The Walmart supermarket chain was also part of this story.
In 1997, the Loufranis attempted to trademark the smiley face, along with the term “smiley” as a brand in the United States to keep the exclusive rights of its reproduction.
Walmart had been putting smiley faces in its stores for years to identify low prices.
The supermarket giant then filed a notice of opposition to the Smiley Company’s application and its own application to register the smiley.
The Smiley Company claimed that their business was in jeopardy.
The judicial comings and goings extended to 2011when the Loufranis and Walmart reached an agreement whose content is unknown.
In 2016, Walmart brought the faces back to its supermarkets after having stopped doing so for 10 years.
This has been the main legal dispute surrounding the smiley happy yellow in its 60 years of history.
the face today
Getty ImagesThe smiley at a 2016 protest in London following the closure of the Fabric club.
Currently, The Smiley Company’s revenue is around $500 million a year.
Hundreds of products are sold on its website, from clothing and accessories in collaboration with haute couture brands, to objects for the home and food and drinks.
With everything and that, Harvey Ball never tried to register or commercially exploit the smiley.
When asked if he was concerned that other people were making a lot of money from the smiley face, he replied “I got paid for the job. And know? I can only drive one car at a time and eat one steak at a time.”
“He had kids in the public schools who adored him. He received letters from all over the world thanking him for the little face. How do you price that? He died without regrets, ”said his son Charles Ball after his death.
He was worried that excessive commercialization at the hands of the Loufrani to redefine the original meaning and intent of its creation.
From there, in 1999, the idea of creating a world smile day, which has been held since then on the first Friday of October. “Do an act of kindness. Help a person smile ”, he put as a motto.
After his death in 2001, Ball’s son created the Harvey Ball World Smile Foundation. In 2012, the foundation was first successful in registering the smiley face in the United States in its name (currently, they are also licensed in India, Canada, and Mexico).
The Smiley Company still owns the mark without the surrounding circle: that is, the colon and the curved line.
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