Franklin Loufrani is the President and Founder of The Smiley® Company, the global lifestyle brand and intellectual property licensor he created in 1971.

A young journalist who had foregone college and joined his first newspaper at 19, Loufrani was working at France-Soir, one of France’s largest daily newspapers, when he became frustrated by the constant stream of negative news. His idea was simple but transformative: create a visual symbol to mark positive stories in the paper, and put that same symbol on consumer products to spread optimism in every home and public space.

He designed a distinctive yellow smiling face, named it Smiley®, and registered it as a trademark. Franklin was the first person to trademark any smiling face design. He then built a licensing business around it, creating product categories and distribution partnerships across Europe and beyond.

What made Franklin’s approach fundamentally different from earlier happy face designs - including the WMCA “Good Guys” campaign of the early 1960s and Harvey Ball’s 1963 corporate badge for State Mutual was that he did not simply create a graphic. He created a brand. He registered a trademark. He built a business identity. He launched a cultural movement.

Under his leadership, the Smiley® brand grew from a French newspaper campaign into a global licensing operation. The simple trademark: a yellow circle, two dots, a smile retained relevancy through over 50 years of cultural movements, from free love to raves to the digital revolution.

In 1997, Franklin’s son Nicolas joined the company and created the first graphic emoticons, extending Smiley into the digital world and creating the SmileyWorld® brand. Together, the Loufrani family has built The Smiley® Company into one of the world’s top 50 global intellectual property licensors, with 450+ licensees operating in 155+ countries and generating over $573 million in annual retail sales.

Franklin Loufrani continues to serve as President of The Smiley Company.