7 August 2025
Flowhaven to help power The Smiley Company’s Global 30 Years of Smileys Anniversary Celebration in 2027
For over 50 years, The Smiley Company has been spreading positivity, creating emotional connections, and shaping global culture. What originally started with a single Smiley icon has grown into a world-class roster of brands that champion emotion, creativity, storytelling, and innovation. In 2020, The Smiley Company and Flowhaven came together, serving as the digital backbone to the lifestyle brand’s licensing operations, helping to power its continued cultural relevance and scale. Flowhaven’s cutting-edge Licensing Relationship Management platform aids the brands brand licensing ecosystem by enhancing visibility, streamlining workflows, and unlocking data-driven decisions. As the company builds up to another anniversary in 2027, the two companies remain just as close.
An Anniversary Celebrating A Digital Revolution
In 1997, Nicolas Loufani expanded on his father’s legacy, adapting the iconic Smiley, into thousands of unique Smileys, and introducing them to digital communication, creating a revolution. This has allowed billions of people across the world to convey their emotions and express themselves like never before.
In 2027, The Smiley Company will be celebrating 30 Years of Smileys, a celebration that will invite creators, innovators, and style leaders to “Express Your World”. To celebrate this anniversary, The Smiley Company will be combining their past with the future, as SmileyWorld, S.W.Smiley, and Mini Smiley release brand new products, collaborations, digital and physical activations, retail campaigns, and much more.
This anniversary follows on from 2022, when the original Smiley® brand celebrated its 50th anniversary, reaching billions of people around the world through over 60 brand collaborations, street art activations, pop-up shops, and takeovers, resulting in over $521M in retail sales. Ahead of that global anniversary, The Smiley Company engaged Flowhaven as their licensing management platform, to help aid the lifestyle brand with streamlining global rights management, approvals, and royalty tracking in over 150+ countries.
A Brand and Platform in Sync
Flowhaven and The Smiley Company are celebrating five years of successful partnership. As Flowhaven approaches its ten-year anniversary, the platform continues to support The Smiley Company by enabling another successful campaign. Through access to vast licensing data points, Flowhaven empowers data-driven decision-making, partner performance tracking, collaboration, forecasting, and more—all delivered in a simple and consistent manner.
Nicolas Loufrani, CEO of The Smiley Company said, “In 1997, the Smileys created a digital revolution, allowing billions of people around the world to communicate and express their emotions instantly. We can’t wait to celebrate 30 years of Smileys in 2027, and invite hundreds of partners to Express Your World, and get involved in the campaign. Flowhaven in itself is a digital service that allows us to communicate with thousands of partners around the world, with structure and speed to keep building meaningful global partnerships.”.
Flowhaven’s Founder & CEO, Kalle Törmä, said, “We’re thrilled and honoured to be part of The Smiley Company’s iconic story, and involved in their 30th anniversary campaign. As Flowhaven approaches 10 years, partnerships like this showcase what’s possible when operational excellence meets cultural relevance.”.
About The Smiley® Company:
The Smiley Company is a global leader in licensing, renowned for its iconic Smiley brand that spreads positivity and happiness across various products and collaborations. With a commitment to innovation and excellence, The Smiley Company continues to inspire joy in the hearts of consumers worldwide through its diverse range of licensed offerings.
Smiley has been spreading joy and optimism to generations since French journalist Franklin Loufrani created the trademarked brand in 1972.
Originally a gesture to urge readers of the newspaper France-Soir to ‘Take the Time to Smile’, soon this ubiquitous symbol of happiness became the most recognised and important icon in graphic design.
In 1996 Nicolas Loufrani, son of Franklin, took over the helm, steering Smiley into the digital revolution. Creating a whole new way of communicating, he added a variety of facial expressions to the original Smiley – his emoticons are now sent around the world infinitely.
Continuing to influence modern culture, Smiley is one of the world’s top global licensing enterprises collaborating on high-profile activities spanning fashion, art, homeware, food and beverage. Major partnerships have included Loewe, Moschino, Raf Simons, Eastpak and LA-based Market, who produce the Market Smiley Basketball – a cultural icon.
Maintaining Smiley’s friendly mantra, Loufrani created Smiley Movement in 2017. The non-profit community works across multimedia platforms aiming to inspire positive change in society addressing urgent societal and environmental problems.
About Flowhaven
Flowhaven is the leading licensing relationship management platform. Built on Salesforce, the #1 customer relationship management (CRM) platform, Flowhaven enables licensing professionals to automate every phase of the brand licensing workflow process within a single solution, including planning and strategy, account and agreement management, content distribution, design approvals, royalty reporting and more. For more information, please visit: https://www.flowhaven.com/
As featured by LicensingSource.net. Read their full coverage of Smiley & Flowhaven Partner for 30 Years of Smileys in 2027