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 to show his uncle who had an atelier in Beirut. As he eventually decided to study a broader spectrum of design, he moved to California and graduated from San Jose State University with a graphic design and photography degree — entirely self-funded through different jobs from working as a file clerk at a technology company to working at a fried chicken restaurant.

With a passion for fashion, Zeidan was naturally drawn to New York, the trend- setting capital. With an internship and some freelance experience at Donna Karen, Zeidan’s first full time job in the capital of fashionistas was as art director at Ralph Lauren, “not my favorite brand at the time, as what I liked was Balenciaga,” he says.

Three years after moving on from Ralph Lauren to join advertising agency Kraftworks, Zeidan’s not-so-favorite brand was back to push him up the career ladder again. This time as global creative director for Ralph Lauren fragrances at French cosmetics and beauty company L’Oréal. The odd thing is Zeidan does not even wear a fragrance, though that ended up being a turn in his favor. “I walked into the interview, they asked me what fragrance I wear and I said, ‘I don’t wear a fragrance, I never designed a fragrance model nor packaging for fragrance’, to which the answer was ‘this is exactly what we are looking for, someone who can come in with a fresh point of view,’” says Zeidan, who went on from there to manage the launch of six fragrances.

In 2009, in the midst of the economic meltdown, his career path took a sharp turn. As L’Oréal attempted to save costs, Zeidan was asked to consider getting rid of the entire creative team, outsourcing the work and becoming creative director. “I said, ‘I’m not interested in being a traffic manager; I’m ready to open up an agency. Give me part of the work and I will take a few of the employees that you want to lay off’,” he recalls. Lengthy negotiations ensued and RO New York was eventually set up with the help of his sister Dina and with a first contract from Ralph Lauren — probably his favorite brand by then.

For his new agency, Zeidan opted to offer several services at lower prices as opposed to specializing in a particular aspect of design — a less attractive offering during the economic crisis. His approach proved profitable as RO generated $700,000 in revenues in its first year of operation. After dropping up to 15 percent in the next two years, revenues were up again in 2012 (though he did not disclose absolute figures). For this year, Zeidan hopes that revenues will reach $1.2 million and ultimately $3 million within five years.

His 10-member team caters to clients from different regions in the world including New York’s Calvin Klein, Switzerland’s Chopard, Austria’s Swarovski and Lebanon’s fashion designers Georges Hobeika and Joseph Abboud.

Returning to Lebanon is not on his foreseeable agenda, but Zeidan said he would love to have more opportunities to provide Lebanese companies with an international perspective. He hopes to corner new markets, mainly hospitality, with two New York restaurants already on his roster. A Lebanese gourmet café “Man’oucherie”, founded by Sara Trad, will be opening in the Chelsea district by the end of the year and features in his upcoming projects.

“That’s very exciting to me because it goes back to my heritage with a cool New York vibe to it,” says Zeidan. As our meeting comes to an end, I am left wondering how much Beirut’s own vibe is missing out with such Lebanese talents abroad.

Ranked the number one football club in New Jersey for boys under 12, George Altirs’ Cedar Stars Academy is “almost his full time job now” he jokes. Established in 2011, the club currently trains up to 125 children between the ages of three and 12, including Altirs’ own boys. It was not the ball that carried Altirs up the ranks of success though. It was hair — or capelli in Italian.

Altirs is the founder and chief executive of Capelli New York, a privately held company which designs, manufactures and markets private-label and branded products in the accessories, apparel and footwear industry for women, teens and kids. 

We meet in the company’s headquarters in Midtown, during the busy market week when buyers visit to view the upcoming winter collection and Altirs asks me where my hair clip is from. “Claire’s,” I answer, and then he asks me where my scarf is from. “Accessorize,” I reply, and then he concludes, “so both are from Capelli”.  With a wholesale distribution network expanding beyond the United States to Europe and Asia, the company’s clients include Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world, as well as large department stores such as New York’s Macy’s, Paris’ Galeries Lafayette and Britain’s Marks and Spencer, in addition to 31 retail stores in the US. 

The story behind Capelli begins in the town of Mijlaya in the Zgharta district of Lebanon, where the Altirs family is from. After attending College Mont La Salle and earning an engineering degree from Ecole Polytechnique Supérieure d’Informatique Liban (EPSIL) in Kaslik, Altirs moved to New York in 1988.  Shortly after arriving in the big apple, he and his brother opened a hair accessories company. “I saw an opportunity and thought we could do better than what people [were] doing, so we started,” he says. With a factory in Brooklyn, Capelli sold to wholesalers and retailers in the US. The product offerings expanded to include everything from hats and scarves to hosiery, footwear, apparel — and of course sportswear for the Cedar Stars Academy.

Capelli even has three franchise stores in Lebanon: one in Ehden, one in Zgharta and one in City Mall on the Dora highway. “It is nice for people in Lebanon to know what we do,” he says. Besides Lebanon, the Middle East remains untapped, though, as Altirs’ focus is on faster-growing emerging markets, mainly China. “We are well established in China; it is big enough for us so we see no need to go somewhere else,” he adds.  With revenues of $200 million last year, production is undertaken in three factories in China, where 1,700 of Capelli’s 3,000 employees are based. With a total floor space of 140 thousand square meters, the factories have an annual total capacity for 42 million pieces and 16 million pairs of shoes — that’s four pairs of shoes per person in Lebanon. 

Entirely owned by the two brothers, Altirs never considered a complete or even partial sale of the company, whether to a private equity group or on the public market. “I have a vision, I don’t want to sell,” he says,  adding that he has the necessary capital to finance future growth. 

As for his main challenge, it’s “a constant race; everything is transparent now and retailers are buying from the Chinese, the Indians, etcetera. When Wal-Mart bids, we have competition from everyone in the world.”  

In 2009, at the height of the financial crisis, retail sales in the US dropped by more than 6 percent, the largest drop on record since 1992, and some retailers did not make it. “The pie became smaller, it’s a lot more competitive,” says Altirs, but with products on offer anywhere from $1 to $30, Capelli’s sales are somewhat “recession proof”. That’s not to say that it made it unscathed; volumes dropped 30 percent during the recession, compelling the company to lay off 30 percent of its workforce. Retail sales in the US have picked up since, growing 5 percent in 2012 after 8 percent growth in 2011, and the National Retail Federation is expecting further growth this year, albeit at a subdued 3.4 percent. “Now we are ok. We are doing well,” says Altirs.

As we wrap up our meeting, he gives a word of advice for Lebanese back home looking to kick off their careers: “Be patient; being rich quick also means it goes quick. Establish your reputation first, let people trust you.” He then goes back to the busy showroom to join his workforce in doing what he does best — enticing more customers to Capelli’s budget-friendly and trendy items — while looking forward to taking his boys on a football trip once market week comes to an end. 

“Justice prevails in the end whether here or in the afterlife,” says Philippe Massoud, recalling the assassination of his father George in 1986, during the Lebanese civil war. Over coffee with his older brother Alex at Ilili, their upscale and trendy Lebanese contemporary restaurant in the Flatiron neighborhood in Manhattan, Philippe goes over his turbulent life path from an upbringing at the Coral Beach Hotel during the war to becoming a top-line New York restaurateur.

“They were trying to segregate Beirut between Christians and Muslims; we were a Christian family living on the Muslim side,” says Philippe, as he explains why he spent most of his childhood in the kitchen of the Coral Beach Hotel, built in 1964 by his father and family. By the age of eight, Philippe was already making culinary comments to the chefs on what ingredients were missing in a meal. His father never wanted him nor Alex to venture into the hospitality business, as his own experience running the hotel in war-ravaged Lebanon was not a profitable one.

Ilili serves traditionally Lebanese dishes with a contemporary twist

Alex listened to his father’s advice — at least initially. He pursued his studies in engineering in Colorado and kicked off his career in Silicon Valley. Coral Beach was no longer a Massoud asset then, so “my father was clairvoyant for me,” says Alex as he did not have the option of returning to the family business when he graduated. Two years after their father’s assassination, the Coral Beach hotel was sold at gunpoint at a distressed price of $5.5 million, “a pretty serious mistake considering that in 1983, we had an offer for $33 million” says Philippe. But the Massoud family, worried about the security of their deceased relative’s wife, decided it was best to sell the hotel. “Our mother was getting threats, and they wanted her to leave West Beirut,” adds Alex.

Philippe, the more rebellious brother, was not as obedient as Alex to his father’s advice, pursuing his studies in hospitality at Cornell University and graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. From a young age, Philippe was determined to launch his own restaurant, even trying to acquire Mediterranean restaurant Aladdin at the age of 17.
 

The exotic starters have proved a hit in Manhattan

On the menu

“[Because of] the fact that we had an abrupt end to Coral I had a fixation that we needed to do something in hospitality,” says Alex, and in 1994, the two brothers reunited. After several failed attempts — where they tried to acquire the Time Out Space from the Tabet family in Beirut and launch a “hip lounge à la Hotel Costes in Paris” — and in New York — where they attempted to open a fast food concept — they decided to drop their entrepreneurial dreams for the time being and split again.

Alex joined the finance industry working as a portfolio manager. Philippe joined the hospitality industry managing multi-concept restaurants in New York, until Lebanese restaurateur Bechara Nammour contacted him in 1999 to launch a Lebanese restaurant in Washington, DC. And that’s how Neyla, with a “high see-and-be-seen factor” according to the Washington Post, came into the fine dining restaurant scene in Georgetown. “It was matter of life and death for me for Neyla to succeed,” he says.

After Philippe fell out with Nammour in 2004, he took a one-year sabbatical during which his dream of launching his own restaurant was reignited. “Our friend George Bitar put fire under my feet,” says Philippe. “He said, ‘We are tired of eating bad Lebanese food in NY, why don’t you open here and we will help you raise the funds?’” And so Philippe and Alex reunited again. In November 2007 their efforts finally came to fruition with the opening of Ilili (meaning “tell me” in Arabic).

The restaurant has 120 employees and plans to expand

With 31 Lebanese-American investors on board, Philippe and Alex, majority owners of Ilili, managed to secure the funds for their ambitious project. Refusing to disclose the exact cost, they only state that if it weren’t for the “inherent savings from aggressive bidding and value engineering”, Ilili would have cost them $6 million to $6.75 million.

The timing of the opening was not ideal, with the US financial meltdown, constraining purchasing power on everything from cars to clothing to restaurants — hommos, tabbouleh and shawarma included. But “people were still coming because it was a new restaurant and a new concept,” says Alex and the restaurant generated $4 million in revenues in its first year of operation, at the height of the financial crisis. For this year, the brothers are expecting up to $9.5 million in revenues.

And a new concept it is. From lunches and dinners offering labneh with salmon roe, to veal in katayef, to duck shawarma in a pita wrap, to brunches offering chankleesh egg man’ouche or zaatar eggs benedict, Ilili’s concept mixes Lebanese traditional cuisine with a creative touch, all set in a lavish décor with up to 250 red seats in a large rectangular cedar wooden space. “We want to be the Nobu [a renowned upscale Japanese fusion restaurant] of the eastern Mediterranean cuisine encompassing all the countries of the Ottoman Empire with a strong focus on Lebanon and what it has to offer,” says Philippe. A Middle East twist also features on the cocktail menu. With a lounge area seating up to 40, cocktails with funky names such as “From Beirut with Passion” and “From Manhattan to Beirut” are on offer for clients to relish.

The Massoud brothers, Philippe and Alexander, have no plans to return to Lebanon

With 120 employees, the Massoud brothers want to take the establishment as far as it can go, with Philippe expecting to generate $30 million to $40 million in the next couple of years. Plans include launching another Ilili in downtown New York, reigniting their initial ambition of launching a fast food concept, going down the private equity route and opening up in London, pursuing Ilili catering, starting Ilili on airplanes; all options are on the table, and the brothers are scratching their heads to decide which is the best route to continue growing.

How about a return of the Massoud brothers to Lebanon? “Given what we have been through, Lebanon is in the freezer for now and the longer it sits in there, the harder it will be to take it out,” says Philippe, but if the opportunity came for him and his brother to run the Coral Beach Hotel, he says he would entertain the idea “under the right condition,” in order to continue their father’s legacy.