Hat tip to BOLDTalks founders Tamer Nahas and Enida Mujahalo for yet another thought-provoking event. We look forward to continuing our partnership with them! More information on BOLDTalks on their website.

Let’s face it: regardless of industry, globalisation punched each of us in the gut–and hard. The very nature of competition mutated—and not just in the cliched China-beats-everybody kind of way. In the design world (note: advertising is not part of the design world, at best it trades in the commodity of design) global networks leveraged reach, knowledge and a client roster to sail ahead, albeit fuelled by winds of mediocrity. The more systematised a service offering, the easier it became to scale–a phenomena amongst all major industries in the last 20 years.

In the 90′s, creative shops were of 3 kinds: branding firms, advertising agencies and marketing shops. The first disruption in the design world was digital—a fringe phenomenon largely disregarded by the industry as a fad rather than the glue that has come to define genuinely meaningful brand experiences today.

I was fortunate enough to have been amongst the “crazies” blowing the trumpet of an impending digital relevance when I founded my first agency (a little digital shop called 13thStudios in 2001). A subsequent acquisition and a board-influenced change of direction towards the formulaic ‘ad agency’ model marked the end of my interest both personally and professionally (I was marginalized and kicked-out of the very company I had founded four years earlier).

Out of the Box? What Box?

Even when I started again from scratch (an agency called Xische & Co.) with a self-professed vision to remain painfully agnostic to industry-trends (the business of media buying and 15% commission, for starters), the unspoken goal was always to scale. Size was on top of the list of what would denote success for me and my partner. We positioned ourselves as a ’boutique’ yet somehow unwittingly always went to bed with a plan to grow into a boutique, just one that was massive!

With an incidental reputation as the guys that take on just a couple of projects a month, to ones that go as far as send a pre-prepared letter declining a new client for not fitting the bill, we started on a path to discovering our key strength, without ever for a second realising it.

We realised clients would approach us when their challenge didn’t fit the typical compartment that was labeled web, or brand, or interactive. Or in many cases, they would come to us for a specific but tiny requirement. They’d come and talk to us while we listened intently. Then while the many challenges they impassioned upon us started crystallising in my head, so did a crazy gamut of ways to bridge them. Most of the time, to the dismay of our project managers, these solutions hazily floating in my head would need us to create new ways of working on the project, and almost with 100% certainly, fall into unchartered territories, across many disconnected disciplines to boot.

After listening carefully, when one of the team members would present our credentials and talk about the 50 different ways we’ve worked with clients in the past, there was always this look of both shock and relief on the faces of our new potential client. It would be like a torrid affair thereafter. But trouble surfaced with practiced certainty, each time.

Choosing Between Big and Different

Every time we would take on a hugely profitable, but creatively-redundant project, we spotted a recurring theme of 3 major issues almost every time. We couldn’t compete with the giant factory agencies on a) delivery times, b) costs, and perhaps most notably c) a ‘sir-yes-sir’ agreeability.

For many years, without much deep introspection, it always remained about winning a competitive bid where we would invariably by the tiny agency thrown into the shortlist for good measure. Being small was supposed to be our strength, and here we were, starting to believe it was our greatest weakness. We were trying to change the rules of the game, while foolishly playing right into the very rules that made the field anything but level.

What we really needed to do was to bow out gracefully, and play in a different game altogether. But we didn’t.

Finding Your Hook Shot, Then Using It

How do we compete with the factories offering off-the-shelf solutions that are cheaper, or built-from-scratch alternatives with 50-man teams quicker than anything we could put together?

The answer came to us not so long ago, after years of failing and never understanding why. We needed to stop pretending to do what they did, and walk away from the usual brief. Our strength as the little guy was agility. Our ethos had been to treat each client as a fresh sheet of paper, with infinite possibilities of how we solved their problems. At Xische, we call this hybrid consulting—the foundation of our business model. We created solutions that are so unique, that by their very DNA, useless to any other client but them. This made it harder for us, but at least we knew it’s what we could compete on.

The only way to beat the big boys is by being in the business of connecting dots that they won’t bother to acknowledge, because they need to rake in more projects just to pay bills. Scale for our business comes from walking away from the typical project, focussing on relationships that evolve with clients, the profitability of charging higher for what we bring to the table, and that fuzzy-but-comforting feeling the client walks away with.

Eleven years in, we intend to remain in this business—we just like it better.

The City Is Your Canvas

This year, Dubai Culture & Art Authority and Dubai-based design boutique Xpoze approached us to be a part of their outdoor art initiative The City Is Your Canvas – commissioning local artists to intervene and create unexpected urban surfaces across the JBR Walk promenade. Back in 2011, we had produced a crowdsourced bench painted with tweets hashtagged #IfIWereABench. This year we’re hoping to push the boundary of the art experience further with an immersive installation titled #AnaDubai.

The Big Idea

We decided to reinterpret the central theme of the project by transforming a public staircase at JBR into a living and evolving canvas that is inclusive rather than exclusive. The piece is called #AnaDubai – inspired by the incredulous diversity of citizens, who together make Dubai the inimitable city only it can be, which in turn defines who they are. The symbiotic relationship between citizen and city is visually articulated by an evolving spectrum of individual colors that form a canvas on the staircase. People are encouraged pick a spot on the staircase and submit their photographs via a Facebook app, and watch their picture transormed into a dot illustration on the colourful stairs.

The idea of art as an exclusive experience limited to a segment of society has always been repulsive to us. #AnaDubai challenges that notion by converting a public space into something unexpected, prompting action, reaction and conversation. The addition of Facebook as a means to become a part of the evolving art piece closes the loop by giving control to the audience to impact what the installation ends up becoming over time. The excited tweets and Instagrams (see below for a glimpse) close the loop of the cycle by making each captured image and reaction a part of #AnaDubai too.

Join the Movement

Stay tuned as the installation comes to fruition in the next few days. Join in and have your photograph featured on the steps at JBR via the #AnaDubai Facebook app. Keep up with the conversation hashtagged #anadubai and #cityurcanvas on Twitter and Instagram. More information about Xpoze and Dubai Culture’s The City Is Your Canvas project can be found on their official website.

SMEInfo is one of the definitive SME portals in the Middle East, featuring inspiring entrepreneurial stories of the UAE. Our founder Danish Farhan was invited to join their Business Mentor panel and share his experience founding several businesses including Xische & Co. over the last ten years.

The full video interview is 8 minutes long and can be viewed in full on SME.AMEInfo.com with Arabic subtitles. The English transcript of the interview has been republished below.

How did you found Xische?

I realised, having attended three different universities, pursuing three very distinctly different degrees, that there was something horrible wrong, either with me or with the education system. I decided to drop out and didn’t know much else. And I’ve always followed this paradigm where I think businesses really need to be built around opportunity, rather than what you’re good at. And having dropped out of university, nobody brands you as being an expert in any one field or form. So I thought, perhaps the best thing for me will be to explore combining an opportunity that I saw coming down the horizon.
In 2000, the world was changing quite rapidly, especially in this part of the world, whereby people were still guided very much by advertising agencies and they measured their success on the basis of return on investment of some sort, that really never linked up. The internet was about to change things quite rapidly, and that’s really where the opportunity arose and I thought, “Ok, let’s set up a web-focused agency.” When I say we, back in the day it was really just me.

What challenges did you face while setting up?

When I decided to set up the company, I didn’t actually tell my parents about it. Having dropped out, they thought I was out fishing the whole day, for months at end. And Media City was just about getting started. I happened to be one of the lucky few that walked into their offices and realised “Ok, I need to set a company up.” They didn’t have any office space, so they allocated a trade license. Back in those days, you could work from home. And it cost me all of Dhs12,256, which is all of the money I had as a 19-year-old. And I had about 8 months to pay the next cheque. And as you know, in this country, not honouring a cheque could have fairly dramatic consequences.
A few months in we realised that it was going nowhere. We weren’t able to convince anybody that we were a serious entity. We weren’t able to actually deliver any of the work that we set out to do. There is only so much you can learn with Photoshop for Dummies and Flash for Dummies, which I did. Eventually I think at the 25th hour – not the 23rd – the 25th hour, we had about two weeks for the cheque to be banked. We managed to close a massive project with a major automotive player in the country, and that led to a lease of life, if you may, and it’s really just been a journey since then. So that was the summer of 2000.

What other challenges did you face along the way?

Two years into the business, we were acquired by our largest client, which was an awesome opportunity at that point, or so it seemed. But unfortunately, that happened to become my business school, because of the hostile takeover. And as it does, everyone makes mistakes. I’ve always been of the school of thought that you’ve got to make mistakes as early as possible and while you’re still young and don’t have to pay bills and support a family, so you could fall down and start voer again.
And that’s really where we went ahead. Lost everything, practically; decided to find a legislative route to start over, but do it correctly, and that was around 2003. And that is where Xische, in its current form was born.
Challenges while we’ve progressed has been finding people. Because of the nature of our business, it’s very difficult to go out and say, “Hey, we’re looking for hybrid people.” They don’t exist. And so over the years we have built a philosophy of hiring outside of the disciplines. So if we’re looking for a designer, typically a designer on the floor has either been a strategist in the past, or has been a developer in the past, or has had nothing to do with the design industry at all.

How did you market your business?

We deployed a concept whereby we built full-blown prototypes on assumptions for clients that we thought would require something specific. We would spend a little bit of time on building that prototype, take it to that client and bet a meeting, which is not easy, but it’s a lot easier if you’ve got something substantial that’s built around them and their requirements. We went out and we hit almost every brand under the sun with something very very specific. And sort of seven out of 10 times we would be approached to do exactly that from that client because they were sitting on that opportunity or that challenge.
One of the primary principles of how we built this business has been size. We’ve deliberately always and always remained under 30 people. Every time we’ve reached a point where we’ve touched a 29 or 30 mark, we’ve spun off into smaller entities that do the same thing. Over the years we’ve had a photography agency that has spun off from Xische. We’ve had an emerging technology firm that worked on things like gesture recognition and touch screens, which really was taking away from the core of our business. We spun that off into another firm. So I think we want to keep the central idea quite focused with what we do.

How did you get involved with start-ups?

With start-ups, about six or seven years ago we realised that starts cannot typically afford to engage agencies or external partners to help them understand what their business is, what their pricing strategy should be, what their product roadmap needs to be, how they need to be branded. And so, when we started with them I saw an opportunity, about five or six years ago, to say “What if we found a way to barter our services for equity in their businesses?” And we decided to do it. It is a – and continues to be until today – a legislative nightmare, purely because of how staid and strict commercialisation structures are in this country. So we had to find our ways to do it. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was done illegally, but it definitely very close.
So we’ve found a way to build a portfolio of investments that have been completely bought in by virtue of services.

What is the best advice you have received?

Get out of the box. And I don’t mean it in the “think outside the box.” But the moment you think that you are a specialist in something, you will never see opportunity in front of you because it does not pertain to what you think you are good at. I think that’s probably the single, greatest principle that I follow across both my personal and professional lives: become a generalist, rather than becoming a specialist. As a generalist you can find specialists in each domain to work with you to accomplish what you need to accomplish. But somebody needs to be able to come up with the idea and connect the dots.

What advice would you give aspiring entrepreneurs?

Very specifically, there is a huge challenge for SMEs, especially in this part of the world to go about perfecting whatever it is that they want to build and launch. I think my advice to them would be to set up something lean and launch in order to be able to test the concept, before blowing up into a full-blown business.
If you spend Dhs100,000 in 12 months, perfecting your prototype and then you hit the market and you realise that this isn’t what the market wants, you’ve just wasted a year of your life, and you’ve wasted a lot of money – either your own or somebody else’s. And so you really need to be able to say, ‘Let me do what I could do in Dhs10,000, spend three weeks on it and see if I am able to convince my potential market to buy this product. If that does exist, then I move forward. If it doesn’t then I have to pivot and rethink it.’
It’s not the concept of you setting up a law firm because you are a lawyer. It’s about setting up something where you can deploy the services of other experts because you found a gap in the market which really requires closing.

Watch the video interview on SME.AMEInfo.com with Arabic subtitles.

The Panelists

1. Jacqueline Novogratz - founder of Acumen Fund
2. Leena Al Olaimy - CEO of 3BL Associates
3. Masood Razak - founder of Goodgate.org
4. Clare Woodcraft - CEO of Emirates Foundation

Panel Moderator Notes

1. Are we witnessing the demise of philanthropy?
2. The notion that ‘charity is bandaid, philanthropy the medicine, and social ventures the factory manufacturing them both’
3. The global debate on whether 1) charity, 2) philanthropy and 3) social entrepreneurship are all just evolutionary steps of the exact same organism.
4. Entrepreneurs creating social impact as a by-product versus philanthropic organizations evolving into entrepreneurial ventures for survival. Role reversal or just different viewpoints.
5. The taboo of profitability in the the realm of caring, helping and giving.
6. CSR as 90% marketing fluff and 10% real impact.
7. The global practice of Zakat as a catalyst for successful philanthropy.
8. ‘Microfinance’ as charity or social investment.
9. Opportunity for collaborative capacity building and greater net impact
10. Key challenges regionally for both philanthropy and social entrepreneurship.

Tweets about “dxb4acumen”

A quick thanks to the wonderful Dubai For Acumen team including Natasha D’Souza, Mahrukh Shaukat, and Sophia Ahmed for inviting us to be a part of the success story that is Acumen Fund. Follow the Dubai chapter on Twitter and keep up with more events and initiatives via their Facebook Page.

What ensued was a raw, interesting and unexpectedly brilliant set of stories that inspired and whetted the audience of over a hundred attendees. We thought it would be cool to profile the apps and the people behind them.

TipBox by Scapehouse

According to their super cool microsite: Tipbox is tip sharing, reinvented for your iPhone. It’s like Twitter meets Quora packaged together in a delightful user-experience. But the real story here is this–Scapehouse is couple of university students by the name of Abdullah and Ali that came up with an idea with no real plan. The lads decide to learn code and built the app in a matter of months, launching it on the iOS store weeks ago. We think with a few minute refinements, this app has real wings to fly.

Stick Swipe by Bored.com

The founders of New York based Bored.com, Jamie Fraina and Kyle Waring presented their seemingly simple but potentially addictive Flash-like game Stick Swipe on iOS that features swiping strategic moves to outdo opponents of all shapes and sizes. It’s a game with serious depth although it doesn’t quite feel that way in the beginning. The UX could be stronger and a lot clearer, but going by the 25,000 downloads they’ve already had so far, we think they know what they’re doing. The big story here is that these New Yorkers shut shop and decided to move their gaming company to Dubai. Strong business acumen, cool geeky ideas and a great go-to-market strategy will definitely see this bunch come back with something new every few months.

Carbon for Android by Dot1ne

Saleh Esmaeili, another UAE-based developer shared a fascinating account of his personal motivation to build a beautiful (and glossy black!) Twitter client Carbon for WebOS first, followed by a hotly anticipated version for Windows Phone 7 and the soon to be released Carbon for Android. A collective wow from the audience only reinforced what industry blogs globally have been saying for a while now — Carbon stands out in that damn-why-didnt-we-think-of-that kind of way. Worth noting was Saleh’s reasoning for a marked absence from iOS devices — stating the market for a beautiful alternative Twitter client was far more potent for the other not-so-design-driven OS platforms. Saleh’s candid attitude and helpful hints to his fellow developers and audience definitely makes him the dude last night.

We at Xische are huge champions of delightful mobile experiences that can impact how much you smile every day! If you have an idea, or an app you’ve already worked on, get in touch with us on Twitter or Facebook and come talk to us if you need any help with mentoring, business planning, fund-raising or just a little marketing nudge. We think it’s an extraordinary time to be in the mobile world.

Don’t forget to check out some great on-going Twitter conversations hash-tagged #UAEapps. Also, the event roundup on Shelter’s blog.

We conceived a series of competitions and activities that ran both virtually (across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube & Foursquare) and tactically on the ground. Since this was going to be hard to keep up with, we crafted a neat little Dashboard on Facebook giving users all the information at a one-stop-shop. The app also curated content being populated across all the different social platforms into one easy-to-use grid.

Brands that implicitly breed admiration are always best positioned to heighten engagement with the promise of real memorable value for every visitor and fan alike. From PlayStation VIG – allowing anybody to apply via the dashboard to become a Very Important Gamer (VIG) and be given access to exclusive tours and beat the queue, to populating great reactions from visitors via photos, spawning a code-cracking competition called Unlock the Symbol. It didn’t stop there; for the Spotted Here competition we shot video blurbs of people’s experiences, encouraging self-tagging to win. On Twitter we hosted Retweet & Win competitions every few hours during the event so ensure the key messages inviting people to the stand were amplified.

But one of the highlights of the event was a little device called the Instabooth we built with our partner venture PhotoBooth. This unassuming little box threw out neat little Instagram prints of anybody that hashtagged their pictures with specific hashtags. All you needed to do was come collect them from one of the many booths we installed at the event.

The Numbers

• 70,701 fans on Facebook
• 31,250 engaged users
• 100% increase in reach
• 4,081 retweets on Twitter
• Twitter trending topic
• 1000+ likes on Instagram

Here’s looking forward to more regional social media case studies that create hybrid experiences rather that purely virtual ones. Thank you PlayStation Middle East for letting us push the boundaries on this one!

(This blog post originally appeared on danishfarhan.com by our CEO).

Back in Dubai after attending Kyoorius Designyatra 2012–an alarmingly inspiring event that bridges the divide between the popular irrelevance of design as a concept, and it’s real global impact. With speakers (some of whom I now call friends) as diverse as design heads of global conglomerates to rural revolutionaries of disruptive innovation, I expected little more than another event cheekily camouflaging itself behind the neocool corporate mantra of design thinking.

On the closing day, I was asked (yes, via Twitter) to share my thoughts on stage. It started out as a little list I scribbled (read: typed on my iPhone) minutes prior to finding myself before a thousand inspired minds. Humbled by several requests to share the list, I put forth my key 7½ take-aways from the event.

Your wife determines everything. (Read: happy wife, happy life).

Courtesy of Robert Wong and Bill Lunderman.

When its from your heart and with humility, money, success, and in some cases your wife coming back, just happen eventually.

Courtesy of Ambrish Arora, Nic Roope and Arunachalam Muruganantham.

When designers move up from the kids table, beautiful things emerge.

Courtesy of Robert Wong and Rodney Edwards.

Branding, marketing, design, advertising, when stripped bare, is nothing but storytelling.

Courtesy of Masashi Kawamura and Kentaro Kimura.

Don’t design things. But the experiences they create.

Courtesy of Karl Heiselman, Bill Lunderman and Joachim Sauter.

A picture is greater than 1000 words; but typefaces make pictures out of words again.

Courtesy of Hanif Kureshi, Paul Barnes, Bruno Maag and Marian Bantyes.

A man can go through his entire life and never truly understand the hardships of a woman. Unless he happens to be Arunachalam. We need to try a hell of a lot harder as men.

Courtesy of Arunachalam Muruganantham.

(½) There’s no perfect time to get started on your dream. Start playing–now. (As in, stop reading this blog post and get started this very moment)

Courtesy of Nic Roope.

Don’t miss this great recap of the event by Jonathan Pimento, brilliant sketches by Kruttika Susarla and the Instagram feed on DesignYatra.comMore about Kyoorius Designyatra here. And lookup #kdy12 on Twitter & Instagram.

]]> http://blog.xische.com/2012/09/09/seven-and-a-half-lessons-from-designyatra-2012/feed/ 1 http://blog.xische.com/2012/06/10/designing-a-simpler-smarter-sony-vaio-for-the-middle-east/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=designing-a-simpler-smarter-sony-vaio-for-the-middle-east http://blog.xische.com/2012/06/10/designing-a-simpler-smarter-sony-vaio-for-the-middle-east/#comments Sun, 10 Jun 2012 11:02:06 +0000 Xische & Co. http://blog.xische.com/?p=860

Xische was approached by Sony with a simple directive: Redesign their rather dated Sony VAIO website for a cool, tech-savvy generation. A generation that effortlessly navigates technology, and has no time for complications or delays.…

Xische was approached by Sony with a simple directive: Redesign their rather dated Sony VAIO website for a cool, tech-savvy generation. A generation that effortlessly navigates technology, and has no time for complications or delays.

So we simplified the visuals and design language to make the site more inviting. We started with embracing the fact that most potential buyers of this series already consumed the web on large monitors of some kind — the usual screen resolution restrictions would only make the site look dated and uninspiring. The result was a clean, gigantic, visual-driven website that is yet to become the norm in the Middle East.

Next, we created a straightforward navigation system that intuitively led to easier access of information, whether on the same page or another one. We also kept in mind the fact that tablets and mobile devices would be just as likely to be used for viewing this website — we deployed fluid transitions and animated loading, all without using Flash, ensuring mobile accessibly was 100%. We developed a mechanism that made for better access speed by loading sections on demand rather than waiting for the entire site to load. And we maximized screen space by deploying features like subtly including a sticky menu bar on top as you scroll down the website.

The result seems to really stand out from what we hear from our client. Site visit numbers have been promising so far. The cherry on the cake has been this: we’ve been asked to take this simple, yet sophisticated new design language and apply it across the entire Sony MEA site. Now that’s success that’s not make.believe (pun intended!)

Check out the simpler, smarter Sony VAIO E-Series website here.

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Our CEO Danish was asked to present a keynote on how ROI is measured for social media. He jumped at the opportunity because he believes asking to measure ‘ROI for social media’ is a bit like being asked to explain what the ‘ROI for a receptionist at an office is.’ It’s an absurd question. In his entertaining talk, Danish talked about why it’s the wrong question to ask, explains why brands are obsessed with nothing besides ‘number of fans’ and 6 key things to do in order to start measuring things that actually matter.