Santiago Vanegas Maldonado
BBC News World
Few symbols are as popular in the world as the smiley face.
It’s everywhere on social media, we send and receive hundreds of it via messaging apps, and it’s in products ranging from stress balls to dish-washing sponges to pills of 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 bills some US$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 smiley 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 it took him just 10 minutes to create it and he was paid $45.
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 buttons 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
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.
About half a million smiley face buttons were printed for that campaign, according to Stern. It was a key step in its definitive popularization.
But it’s not until it arrives in Philadelphia, in the hands of 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, they were selling the smiley 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 (“Have a happy day”).
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 merchandising.
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 world’s imagination.
The Millionaire Smiley Company
In 1971, Franklin Loufrani, a French journalist from the newspaper, added to the complex history of this popular symbol. France Soirwho used a rather Harvey Ball-like face to signal the positive news.
Loufrani, who assured that it was he who invented it, was 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. They were an immediate cultural hit.
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 1990s, it 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 smiley face an integral part of digital communication: he designed hundreds of emoticons with different face 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 is so simple that no one 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
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 on 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 legal to-and-fro extended until 2011, when the Loufrani 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 yellow smiley face in its 60-year history.
the face today
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 responded, “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 did worry that excessive commercialization at the hands of the Loufrani would redefine the original meaning and intent of his creation.
From there, in 1999, he came up with the idea of creating a World Smile Day, which has been celebrated 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 managed to register the smiley face in the United States for the first time in his 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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See original article on BBC