By Bilal Ahmed & Laila Essa · Co-Founders of Taglime · March 2026
We didn’t start Taglime to build an agency. The honest version is much smaller than that.
It was 2017. One table. Two people. A shared stubbornness about the value of words.
We kept asking a question that felt almost embarrassingly simple: why does Arabic brand copy get treated like a second-class citizen? English copy gets time, craft, strategy, multiple rounds of thinking. Arabic gets a translation and a sign-off. We thought that was wrong. We still do.
So we started writing. Carefully. For anyone who would let us.
Nine years later, we have 6,500 projects behind us. We have written for giga projects and government ministries, for sovereign wealth funds and specialty coffee roasters. We named streets in cities that are still being built. We rebranded a national airline. We covered Hajj live, in real time, for millions of people watching from around the world.
We have also gotten things wrong. Misread a brief, underestimated a timeline, delivered work we were proud of to a client who needed something completely different. Every single one of those taught us something.
Here is what nine years of writing for Saudi Arabia actually looks like from the inside and the lessons it has taught us over the years.
#1 The First Lesson Came From Getting It Wrong
A few months into Taglime, we delivered Arabic copy for a client in Riyadh. Technically, it was fine. The grammar was correct, the vocabulary was appropriate, the meaning was accurate. The client came back and said: “It doesn’t feel like us.”
We read it again. They were completely right.
The copy had the structure of Arabic without any of the warmth of Saudi Arabic. We had written in a register that belonged to no one in particular. Too formal to feel human, too plain to feel considered. The words were correct and that was the problem. We had stopped at correct.
That was the moment we understood that in Saudi Arabia, how you say something matters as much as what you say. The dialect you choose, the register you write in, these are not decoration. They are how a reader decides whether you understand them or whether you are just filling space with words.
From that brief onwards, we stopped treating Arabic as a single language and started treating it as a collection of registers, each one right for a specific context and wrong for others. Fus’ha for institutional weight. White Arabic for modern accessibility. Hijazi for warmth. Najdi for directness. Getting that choice right, for every brief, became one of the most important things Taglime learned how to do.
#2 The Saudia Year Was When We Understood What We Were Actually Building
In 2023, we were brought in on the Saudia rebrand.
We are careful about what we share from client work. But we can say that being trusted with the voice of a national airline, in the middle of its transformation, changed the way we thought about what Taglime was for.
The brief asked for a new tone of voice. What that actually required was a year of sitting with the question of who Saudia had been, who they were becoming, and what kind of voice could carry both of those things at once, across a boarding pass, a campaign headline, a press release, an announcement heard at 30,000 feet.
The big thing we took from that year: a brand’s voice is a strategic decision, not a creative one. And figuring out what that voice should be, before anyone writes a single word, is where the real work lives.
That project pushed us past copywriting into something closer to communications partnership. A copywriting agency takes a brief and executes it. A communications partner helps you figure out what the brief should be. We became the second thing, and we have never gone back.
#3 New Murabba Taught Us That Language at Scale Needs Architecture
Before New Murabba, we thought we knew what a large project looked like.
New Murabba had over 250 individual naming assets. A city built around one of the most ambitious structures ever conceived. Every street, district, building, and experience touchpoint needed a name. And every name had to feel like it belonged to the same world as every other, culturally coherent, visually workable, linguistically screened, and rooted in a story that made the whole thing hold together.
The most important thing we figured out on that project: you cannot name 250 things well unless you first build the system that explains why each name exists. The cultural story has to come before any individual word. Once the story is clear, the names follow. Without it, you are just making things up 250 times.
We carry that thinking into every project now, even small ones. What is the system? What is the logic? What makes each word feel like it belongs?
Saudi Arabia builds at a scale that forces you to think this way. It has made us considerably better at our craft.
#4 Covering Hajj Live Was the Clearest Brief We Have Ever Had
Most briefs are about brand. This one was about responsibility.
Writing live coverage for the Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah, in real time, across three continuous days during the holiest period of the Islamic calendar, for an audience of millions, was unlike any other project we have worked on.
Every word was going out to pilgrims, to families watching from home, to governments and scholars and people for whom these days meant everything. The writing had to be warm without being casual. Reverent without being inaccessible. Immediate without being careless. We briefed our team on all of that, but more than the content requirements, we briefed them on the weight of the moment and what it meant to get the words right.
What we came away with: the best writing disappears into the thing it is serving. Almost nothing we produced in those three days drew any attention to itself. It just worked. People got the information they needed. Families felt close to something happening thousands of miles away. That was the job, and the writing served it.
That is what we want every piece of Taglime work to do.
#5 Nobody Planned for Taglime to Become a Strategy Partner. The Work Just Pulled Us There
For the first couple of years, we were copywriters. We wrote website copy, social content, brand copy when it was asked of us. We were good at it and the work kept coming.
What changed was gradual. Clients started bringing us in earlier. At the beginning of a project, when the thinking was still forming, asking us to help shape what they wanted to say before they said it. Not briefing us on a tone of voice, but asking us to help build one. Not commissioning a campaign, but asking us to help work out what the campaign should actually be about.
taglime founders, we started spending more time in strategy conversations than in writing sessions. And we realised that the most valuable thing we could offer was not the writing itself, but the thinking that made the writing worth something.
Taglime still writes copy. But what we are really doing is helping Saudi brands figure out what they need to say, to whom, and why, and then saying it in a way that lands. Those are connected but different things. We are glad the work pushed us toward both. We are now a communication agency that excels at strategy as well as writing, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
#7 Saudi Arabia Runs on Connection. Every Brief We Get Reminds Us of That
Every market has its way of doing things. Saudi Arabia has something more specific than convention. It has a communication culture built around the relationship coming before the transaction.
Trust is established before business happens. Warmth is not a nice-to-have, it is load-bearing. The way you address someone tells them immediately how much thought you put into reaching them. Saudi audiences are not forgiving of content that feels like it could have been written for anyone, because they know it was.
We have watched brands come into this market with content that is technically correct and completely ineffective. Efficient, well-structured, on-brand for their global guidelines, and totally disconnected from the person reading it. The content did not fail because it was bad. It failed because it was not written for anyone in particular.
The question we ask before any piece of work leaves us is the same one we asked in 2017 at that one table: does this sound like it was written for a person?
78% of our clients come back. We think that question is most of why.
Nine Years. One Belief. Still the Same Question.
We started with a table and a belief.
The table is gone. We have an office now, a team, 6,500 projects. None of that has changed the thing we started with.
Arabic brand copy deserves the same attention that English brand copy gets. Saudi brands deserve a communications partner who actually understands the culture they are communicating within. The people reading that copy deserve to feel that someone thought carefully about them before putting words in front of them.
That is what we have been trying to do since 2017. We hope it shows.
Bilal Ahmed & Laila Essa
Co-Founders, Taglime · Riyadh · 2017 to 2026
FAQs
Who are the Taglime founders?
Taglime was founded in 2017 by Bilal Ahmed and Laila Essa in Riyadh. The agency was built around one belief: that Arabic copywriting deserved the same care and craft as English copywriting. Nine years later, it is Saudi Arabia’s leading specialist copywriting and localization agency.
What is the story behind Taglime?
Taglime started at one table in Riyadh in 2017, with two people and a conviction that Saudi brand communication was being underserved. The agency grew project by project, working with giga projects, government entities, national institutions, and multinational brands, building a reputation for cultural depth and process discipline over nearly a decade.
How long has Taglime been operating?
Since 2017, making it one of the longest-established specialist copywriting agencies in Saudi Arabia. As of 2026, the agency has completed over 6,500 projects and has a 78% repeat client rate.
What brands have Taglime worked with?
Taglime’s portfolio includes Saudia, New Murabba, NEOM, Amaala, the Public Investment Fund, the Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah, American Express Saudi Arabia, Trendyol, Qiddiya, Lexus, King Abdulaziz International Airport, and Solutions by STC, among many others.
What makes Taglime different from other agencies in Saudi Arabia?
Copywriting, strategy, and localization is the entirety of what Taglime does. The agency uses a 100% human, manual process with no machine translation, employs native Saudi writers fluent across all Arabic registers, and has nine years of experience on the Kingdom’s most demanding briefs. It is a specialist, and that specialism is the difference.
Does Taglime work in Arabic and English?
Yes, with equal capability in both. Taglime develops English and Arabic brand voices in parallel, ensuring consistency across languages rather than treating one as primary and translating into the other.
If you have read this far, you understand what Taglime is better than any brochure could explain.
We would love to write yours next.
Reach us at hello@taglimeagency.com or visit taglimeagency.com
