Nicolas Loufrani

Early life & Career
Born on 17 December 1971 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, Nicolas lived in France until he was 20 years old and then spent most of his time between New York and London whilst keeping a base in Paris. His first job was in the advertising business and then he decided to turn his hand to fashion and launched the UK luxury tailoring brand Ozwald Boateng which he then sold back to Boateng many years later.
The Smiley Company

In 1996 Nicolas started the Smiley licensing company with his father Franklin Loufrani in London taking back all pre existing rights he had maintained in the Smiley trademark. At this time the Loufrani’s owned the Smiley logo only. It went by many different names around the world for example; Carita Feliz in Spanish countries, Le sourire in France and the happy face in the USA. Nicolas decided to register the name and to start using the logo in connection with the name by creating a real brand identity (labels, packaging, catalogs etc...), opening international representation on all 5 continents and manage all licensees in a more professional way. He also started creating new designs to use on products and this is how hundreds of variations of the original Smiley logo began. In 1998 the Loufrani’s put these new designs online for the first time as GIF files and subsequently became a massive online phenomenon through viral use as well as copying. In the following years Nicolas has created a whole host of different Smiley characters; Baby Smiley, the Anismileys, Smiley JR and Smilette which have given life to the Smiley logo and introduced a whole world of entertainment which is now supported by an extensive range of children books. All these efforts have resulted in massive exposure of the smiley logo with hundreds of licensing partners coming on board to do everything from clothing to perfumes, plush, stationery, promotional campaigns etc...
In 2005 the Loufrani’s created a charity ‘The Smiley World Association’ (SWA) and started rethinking about how to do business in a different ways. Nicolas decided to start doing more ethical clothing using organic cotton and sharing part of the company’s profits to social causes through the SWA. He also decided to re-launch the original Smiley which was not really the company’s focus anymore and decided to now work with two brands. Smiley a fashion brand based on the original Smiley logo as a brand promoting a happy vision of life and spreading positive values and SmileyWorld based on thousands of different icons as a lifestyle brand helping people communicate their emotions and expressing their personalities.
In 2010 the ‘Smiley Factory Ltd’ was launched to regain control of the company’s clothing activity, quality of products and distribution.

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