SHIFTING FOCUS

“Discouraged by these losses and hopeful about Bechir Gemayel’s election, Nakhlé and I decided to return to Beirut and shift our focus back to our office there, which during our international expansion had suffered quite a lot of neglect. A number of our clients like Bata and Almaza, were now working with Jean Claude Boulos who had created his own advertising agency. That same year, during the Israeli invasion, our offices at Minkara, mostly our archives, were destroyed by a bomb,” Rizk painfully recalled.

In 1986, the agency opened a branch in Achrafieh in Rizk’s deceased father’s apartment to make it more convenient and safer for its East Beirut employees. During that