Rony Zeidan

ENAR

Based in San Francisco working as an art director at eluxury.com — the e-commerce site of French luxury goods giant Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy — flying out to New York every couple of months for photoshoots, staying at the Soho Grand Hotel, earning a decent salary: Rony Zeidan had it good. But in 2002, he left it all behind, moved to the Big Apple and crashed on a friend’s couch. “Everyone thought I was insane because I had a great job, but the company was going down a more commercial and less creative direction and it wasn’t my vision,” says 35-year-old Zeidan as we sit in the offices of his four-year-old company, RO New York, a boutique modern luxury design and advertising agency. Eluxury.com eventually closed down in mid-2009. As a child in Lebanon attending Saint Joseph School in Cornet Chahwan, Zeidan wanted to become a fashion designer, drawing sketches