After the success of the RUBIK’s® audio range, BIGBEN is extending its partnership with THE SMILEY COMPANY to feature the world famous Smiley icons on a variety of audio products starting with the launch of a compact Bluetooth® speaker.
This new agreement allows BIGBEN and its partners to open new sales opportunities for The Original Smiley Brand, which will feature a range of Smiley’s expressive icons.
These icons helped revolutionize technology as we know it today, with billions of Smileys being sent every day across a variety of telecommunications devices. The Smiley speaker by BIGBEN will most definitely be a must-have for teens during 2017!
Alain Falc, Founder and CEO of BIGBEN: “We are pleased to have renewed our partnership with The SMILEY COMPANY and to get the opportunity to offer to the teens a fun and expressive wireless speaker. Other audio products will be developed in this range to please every consumer. Keep smiling!”
Nicolas Loufrani, CEO of The Smiley Company and the creator of the world’s first digital Smileys added: “We are very happy to sign Smiley with BIGBEN who are already doing a great job with our Rubik ‘s license. This is part of our strategy to consolidate the category management and sales management for both brands with key licensed partners.”
About THE SMILEY COMPANY
Smiley, the happiest brand ever, was founded by Franklin Loufrani in 1971 through a newspaper promotion to make people happy. Using the logo to highlight good news, it allowed readers to see the bright side of life throughout any day.
In May 1997, Nicolas Loufrani (CEO of The Smiley Company) started experimenting with Smileys to create graphic faces that corresponded to the pre-existing expressive emotions made from punctuation mark (ascii emoticons). Loufrani sat down with his designers in New York and created a dictionary of emotions that consisted of thousands of different Smileys, which he registered with the United States Copyright Office from 1997. When he published them on the internet in 1998, these became the world’s first digital Smileys. This allowed The Smiley Company to create a new brand (SmileyWorld) that expressed thousands of emotions and that could be applied to a variety of products.
The Smiley Company is today one of the TOP100 licensing Companies in the world, with over 260 licensees globally generating annual turnover at retail in excess of $265 million and selling more than 23 million products year round. The Smiley trademark is registered in over 100 countries and in more than 13 product categories and according to a recent Toluna survey has 97% recognition across the world as a symbol of positivity.