A Chit Chat with Arabia Weddings: Muby Astruc Of Fairytale
Fairytale by Muby Astruc, is a company that took writing and designing books to a new level.
The company creates beautiful, bespoke coffee-table-novels™ about your wedding day; written in third-person, so that you and your husband feature as the central characters of the greatest love story ever told.
We had the chance to ask the founder of Fairytale Muby Astruc a few questions about this unique idea:
- Kindly introduce yourself with a brief on your background and how that background helps towards creating Fairytales.
I am Muby Astruc, the creator and co-partner of Fairytale by Muby Astruc.
For me, life is about people, their loves, their lives, their tears, their laughter, their energies and their thoughts. I cherish my time with people. I listen to them, to their stories, to their dreams; hold their hand through the tears; I laugh, cry and smile with them. I then carry with me all those emotions and translate them into words. With nearly three decades of being a published writer and much-loved journalist in the UAE, as well as ten years studying psychology, I take the best of the world of words, merge them into the realm of emotions and create structure through the learnings of the mind: both conscious and sub-conscious. The Fairytales I create are as much a part of me as they are the love stories of the wonderfully inspiring people they are about.
Each Fairytale is a labour of love. A story written with tears and laughter spilling onto its pages. I understand the real lives, the love, the commitments that have gone into creating these Fairytales and I honour those experiences with each word I write.
Every day of my life, I seek people’s stories; I dig into them, scrape off the layers, strip the soul naked and bare, and together with the client, reconstruct the pieces, building back a whole stronger than its individual parts. I draw from my 10-year-experience of being a life counsellor, when creating my Fairytales. I dig, dig, and dig, until I find the vulnerable little person inside who’s screaming in silence for his story to be heard. We carefully add volume to that little voice, so that it is finally heard. So that the world that surrounds that little voice is aware of the grandiose of their love story.
So that their future generations all understand the root of the tree from which they were created. I use every skill learned as a writer, author, journalist, editor, designer, model, script-writer and spokesperson for the unheard, to lend the power of my pen to create words.
Words of love. Powerful words. Eternal words. Words that will go down in history. Words that will survive the sands of time. Words that will do what words have always done. Pass on legacies and stories from one generation to the next.
And just like people and their lives, we continue our Fairytale journey from the inside out. Once we have captured the heart of the book, the magical love story of a newly-married couple, we move on to its aesthetic. The design and layouts are a combination of nearly two decades of being a designer, having trained under Dr Mario Garcia of Garcia Media (USA); and using the experimental German Gestalt Principals of Design. Each Fairytale is designed exclusively for the couple it has been created for. Whether it’s a colour-scheme, their wedding theme, or based on the vibes of the couple; the layout of a Fairytale is unique in its individuality. The design, a visual translation of the emotional content of the Fairytale.
Combining all these techniques and methods, gives you a world’s first: A coffee-table-novelTM that’s as unique and as eternal as your story.
- Where did the idea for Fairytale by Muby AstrucTM come from?
In January of 2014, it was my first-born Alexander-Skye’s first birthday. I had just completed one year of motherhood and nearly two years of marriage. I was three months pregnant with my second son, Tristan-Stone. The road leading up to that January 6, 2014, had been tumultuous; full of excitement and adventure, but also tears and heartbreak. I’d gone through the highest highs and the lowest lows. And standing there on my son’s first birthday, watching him cut the cake I had so lovingly designed, I had tears in my eyes. Tears of emotion for my son, of course. But also tears of acknowledgement.
In acknowledging that my son had just completed his first year of life, I had thus, to also acknowledge that by default, I too, had completed the first year of a new kind of life. A new life that I’d entered with a blindfold on, believing that roads don’t come with bumps and curves. It was a huge moment for me. I’d been through it all and I’d survived. And here we were, a family celebrating the extreme joy and extreme confusion that that first year brings. I wanted something to mark the moment. Something that age wouldn’t forget. Something that time couldn’t erode.
Something to remind me of the mountain we’d just climbed as a family. And the mountains that still lay ahead of us. I looked all over Dubai, then the UAE, France and the UK for the kind of memoir that would honour the past year of my life. But all I found were photo albums and scrap books. I toyed with the idea of a memoir, but even that couldn’t show visually, what the words of the book expressed. I didn’t want just another novel with a few end pages of photos. I wanted the entire package. The real deal. A story that revealed the psyche behind the persona, a book that illustrated the life lived, photos that added faces to the tear-jerking text besides it. A book that I could give my son someday. A testament of what we went through together. A love letter that would live well beyond me. A time capsule for our future generations.
But each search lead to dead ends. The product I had in mind did not exist. But how could it not? How could there not be the kind of book that combines all the elements of photo albums, biographies, scrap books and diaries?
And thus, Fairytale by Muby AstrucTM was born.
- Who is your main target client that you would like to produce a Fairytale for?
Our target clientele are people who believe in investing in the most premium investment on earth: An investment in their own story. The one investment that money or the economy cannot diminish. Our target clientele are People. People of every race, creed and colour in the world. People who cherish memories; people who have a tale to tell; people who believe in leaving behind the greatest of all gifts for the next generation. The gift of the word. The gift of a story. The gift of life. Treasured, from one generation to the next.
- How do you capture the essence of the love story between the couple you are working with?
The key is to feel the couple. To experience, first hand, the magnitude of their love. To be humbled by its grandeur. To be invited into their secret world. A world that no one else ever enters. And in that world, lies the essence of their love story. In order to capture that essence, our writers and I must first experience it.
Within that experience lies the heart of their Fairytale.
- What is your top advice for brides on their wedding day.
My top three pieces of advice for brides to be, are these:
First, and perhaps the single most important thing I could say to a bride, would be to play the watcher. Experience your wedding happening to you, while also being able to watch it happen to you.
Too often brides get so caught up in the moment that they neglect to observe their own feelings. So that’s my second bit of advice: Observe your own happiness. Feel, but also understand, the emotions you experience. Realise the grandiosity of the moment. Take mental snapshots of your emotions.
Third on this list is something many brides go through, but end up denying to themselves: Fear. My advice would be to acknowledge those deepest fears about your wedding day. Then breathe them out gently. Hold on to your thoughts, share them with your partner. Realise that it is love that has brought you to this point, and it will be love that will sustain you from this point on. Let love take you through the day; acknowledge its power. Not everything may go to plan on the day. Not everyone may behave the way you want them to behave. Not everyone will fall in love with you just because you’re the bride. Through all those doubts and insecurities, remind yourself of why you are where you are. Love has brought you to this door. And love has the power to take you through it, holding your hand, ever so gently, until it can drop you off at the gate of your happily-ever-after. Trust in love. Trust in yourself. Trust in the power of the moment; the beauty behind the rituals you are about to perform. Above all, trust in your dream. Let the fears and worries belong to someone else. This is your wedding day. Allow no thing but love to dictate it.
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