Celebrating 25 years
By Adeeb, Waleed, and Faten | 5 min read
In 1996, the world was clicking itself into a new socioeconomic paradigm. Huddled behind bulky CRT screens, suddenly familiar ‘browsers' invited us to navigate a World Wide Web. With the reassuring buzz of 28.8k modems, we streamed astonishing walkie-talkie quality music and videos the size of a matchbox, read news from around the world, printed email addresses on our business cards. Amazon was two years old, selling mostly books, VHS movies and CDs. Google was still two years away, and would need another ten to become a verb. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter weren’t even prenatal. We bought plane tickets via travel agents, banked through a branch, ordered food by dialing a number, gossiped by water coolers. In 1996, the number of websites worldwide grew 10x over 1995 to 250,000. But that was nothing. By 2021, around 2 billion digital properties sat atop servers bursting with 74 zettabytes of data. That’s 74 trillion gigabytes. A year. E-commerce in 1996 was worth pennies compared to about $5 trillion in 2021, when over 60% of the world had become active internet users helping to usher in a new class of billionaires’ trips to the moon. When our grandkids read about this history, probably through augmented reality retinal goggles with smell-o-vision, it’s safe to assume ‘explosive’ and 'transformative’ will feature frequently. As they should.
In 1996, two brothers saw this juggernaut and formed Khayal Consultants. Armed with an engineering background and a sense of design, plus a healthy dose of nerdiness, Khayal was Kuwait’s first fully in-house graphic design and web development company. As the years progressed, so did we, recruiting our sister from a senior position in a leading bank to bridge Khayal's design and development services with customer experience insight and image building.
Over the years, we have constantly evolved our services, absorbed new technologies and utilized best practices in design, planning, development and execution. We embraced an omnichannel lens to our projects and incorporated 360˚ views of our clients’ connection to customers, delivering consistent, relevant and delightful experiences.
Throughout our timeline, we collaborated on the vital objective of bolstering brands’ relationships with their stakeholders. After all, stakeholders are the two legs a brand stands on: customers and staff. This focus has been key to Khayal’s survival.
We would like to thank the companies that entrusted us over the past 25 years. It has been a privilege. We would also like to thank our internal team, who share our company’s passions. Their ongoing growth and innovation allows us to harness the latest tools and technologies to benefit our clients.
We look forward to an even more transformative future.
