Once my brother and I gathered the courage to bring Closed Captions Communications to life, our 2023-born branding studio, we found the online life (online banking, online registration, online business license) and ease of doing business to be big winners when choosing where to be headquartered.
Since we’re not complete masochists, we chose DXB as our base and Beirut as our favorite office location.
With a combined wealth of experience in marketing, design, communications, journalism and creative copywriting, we thought we’d make a dynamically diverse duo who can give companies a fresh perspective on branding and storytelling.
We’ve done so individually, and there’s nothing holding us back from doing it together.
The fact that we’re siblings and business partners as of recent plays to our advantage, too. This didn’t come without some hiccups since our communication was mainly over phone calls and texts – Serge is based in Dubai and myself in Beirut.
Shared vision
Since we’re brother and sister, we had plenty of heart-to-heart discussions and conversations that went back all the way to our childhood and tackled some unresolved issues.
We’ve come to realise that good partnership, whether professionally or personally, requires clear communication and a shared vision.
Having our eyes on a future that’s similar to both of us is something we have in common, even if that future was – and remains – blurry to a certain extent; as long as we can see the silhouette and work towards it.
We’re here to create and have fun along the way, not just stack up money.
There’s downtime? Cool. Serge will sketch up some illustrations and I’ll write a script that matches.. show people what we produce when no monetary incentive is involved.
We’re artists and creatives; we’ve been repeatedly told to raincheck our full potential of crazy creativity for the sake of implementing safe and shy guidelines set by managements that more often than not seek profit above all else.
We like the process of building true connections with our clients and getting to know their personal relationship with their business.
How better to understand a company owner’s main purpose and vision for their business than to ask them the fun yet hard questions?
As humans with interests and hobbies and goals, we solely and humbly would like to brand the world over with visually appealing brands that are functional, sustainable, and well-researched.
We’re not asking for the impossible yet we don’t mind jogging in its direction.
By Sarah Trad, co-founder of Closed Captions Communications
