VOICEdotcom

“Before we met, my husband David ran an audio recording studio above Garlic’s Restaurant and was a tenant of Farhi Holdings Corp at 483 Richmond Street on the second floor. Mr. Farhi believed in a young man with a vision for giving others a voice through music. After the studio opened, the London Free Press wrote a Business Monday story covering David’s studio, The Flying Disc.

Meet: David and Stephanie Ciccarelli, Founders of Voices.com, the world’s largest online marketplace of voice actors, located at 100 Dundas Street. Read on to hear their amazing FHC success story…

At the time, I was a first-year music student at Western University. My joy was to sing at weddings, funerals, teach children to sing and lead music each week at the church I attended. After mass, especially as wedding season drew near, it wasn’t uncommon for people to ask me if I could sing at their ceremonies. Whenever that happened, I would sing for them to give them a sense of my vocal abilities and the kind of songs that would make their special day even more significant. The only thing missing from my marketing toolkit was a sample of my voice that the bride and groom could listen to and consider in my absence. Knowing all the time I spent showing people what I could do, my mom suggested that I go to a studio to record an MP3 that could be shared with people online. That way, they could listen on their own and then book me to sing.

As it would happen, my mother read the paper as part of her job. When going about her usual activities, she came across the article about David, cut it out and brought it home for me to find. Because of that same article about the studio, I not only made several recordings of my voice to help me in my career but also met my future husband.

We got married a year later. Once our first child was born, we quickly realized that with a new baby came a new lifestyle and way of doing business in the field of sound. That new way of doing business became Voices.com. Although we eventually moved from Richmond Street, we still had great fondness for Mr. Farhi and gratitude for all he had done for us during those early years.

More than a decade passed and our company grew. As the company transitioned from just the two of us to over 100 employees, we were running out of room and needed to find a space that would serve our current team and the larger team we will become. Where would we go? Could we all be on the same floor again?

One day, David got a call from Mr. Farhi about his building across from Budweiser Gardens, known to most Londoners as the Bell Building. He had an entire floor – 45,000 square feet to be exact – that he wanted to show us. This was it! The answer to our prayers and question of where we should go to continue to grow.

Moving into Mr. Farhi’s building at 100 Dundas Street has allowed us to enter into a new phase in the life of our business. Mr. Farhi has always been an advocate for us and his generosity as a landlord is unmatched. Without a partner like him and his team looking to serve our best interests, we wouldn’t have been able to dream as big or make it this far.”