For over 50 years, The Smiley Company has been spreading positivity, creating emotional connections, and shaping culture. What started with a single Smiley icon has grown into a world-class roster of brands that champions emotion, creativity, storytelling, and innovation.
In 2022, Smiley celebrated its 50th anniversary with a global campaign that reached billions of people around the world through over 60 brand collaborations, street art activations, pop-up shops and takeovers. With thanks to the dedicated Smiley Team which has developed a unique expertise, the campaign increased brand awareness by 15%, brand love by 32%, and resulted in over $521M in retail sales.
For 2027 and Smileys 30th anniversary, we want to go bigger and better, combining digital and physical activations that celebrate the importance of the brand and the phenomenon that it started.
History of Smileys
In 1997, Nicolas Loufrani expanded his father’s legacy by adapting the iconic Smiley, creating different categories of Smileys. This revolutionized global communication through digital emoticons, allowing people to express themselves digitally and physically like never before.
Since then, Smileys has grown to include thousands of icons across more than 20 categories, such as emotions, animals, flags, nations occupations, sports and more. Originally sold under the brand SmileyWorld, it has now been joined by Mini Smiley, a preschool brand, and S.W.Smiley, with an edgier art direction for young adults, all using different styles of Smileys.
30 Years of Smileys
In 2027, Smileys will be celebrating their 30th anniversary, inviting creators, gamers, innovators, and style leaders to join The Smiley Company to “Express Your World”. This is an opportunity to unite, inspire and bring joy to the world through emotional expression and creativity both digitally and physically. The anniversary will blend digital activations with physical opportunities allowing everyone to get involved and truly express themselves.
Express Your World
To celebrate the anniversary, Smileys are going to combine their past with the future of the brand and ensure that it resonates with all key audiences. They will do this by:
- Access to the extensive archive of tens of thousands of icons, characters, and style guide graphics, offering endless collectible opportunities and segmentation by age, gender, market tier, and lifestyle.
- Major IP collaborations with partners joining the event to create unique content across animation, music, and video games.
- Creating Retail campaigns with key mass and high street chains and Pop up shops in major local department store chains
- A major celebration of internet culture, showcasing the brands role as the first and digital IP phenomenon, andpowered by upcoming digital partnerships with global players.
- 100s of existing partners, suppliers, retailers, brands and promotion agencies, launching consumer products and participating in the marketing campaigns.
- Global advertising and PR agencies implementing and amplifying a global communications campaign across the USA, Canada, France, Italy, UK, GAS, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, GCC, India, China, Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.