Wassim Orfaly. Founder, Direction 88.
Direction 88 was founded in 2026 as the independent continuation of that work.
The number is a nod to balance — two disciplines held in equal measure. Brand and business. Strategy and execution. The studio exists because those things cannot be separated without both becoming weaker.
01
That brand work fails most often at the client level — not because of bad strategy or bad design, but because clients are caught inside organizational dynamics that push them toward decoration and documentation instead of commitment. The professional's job is to educate, to refuse what won't succeed, and to give clients the clarity and external authority they need to commit.
02
That brand work breaks in translation — when the discipline of holding business understanding and creative direction together is abandoned. Most agencies abandon it because their structure makes it nearly impossible to maintain. The failure isn't in the people. It's in the practice.
03
That the market for brand work is broken — not because clients are cheap, but because they can't reliably evaluate what they're buying. The job is not to exploit that opacity. It's to resolve it — by making thinking visible, by caring genuinely about the businesses we work with, and by being accountable for the quality and effectiveness of what we deliver.
Direction 88 operates as a senior-led studio. Engagements are run directly, without handoffs between strategy and execution. Creative work is led from the same hand that develops the direction. The studio works with a network of trusted collaborators on a per-engagement basis — not as outsourced freelancers, but as senior craftspeople under continuous direction.
The studio is based in Mississauga, Canada, and serves clients across the Gulf and North America.
Every business needs a direction it can act on. Let's talk about yours.
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