How It Started

Call it a midlife crisis, call it finally being bored or brave enough — Ester Kannelmäe, the founder of SARBAH, saw herself no longer happy serving a single organisation. Her kaleidoscope career had given her breadth of knowledge, and she was watching talented and hard working people struggle around her with exactly the things she was good at. She wanted to help. Properly, and on her own terms.

A new adventure needed a name. Her small design hustle was already growing in parallel, already had a name she loved — HABRAS, the Estonian word for fragile. It felt right that her two practices should be connected, like twins. So SARBAH was born — a palindrome, a deliberate mirror of HABRAS.

And then, while researching the international meanings — because she did not want to say something vulgar in another language — a surprise appeared. A little sign from a kind universe: SARBAH is almost exactly the Swedish word sårbar. Vulnerable. Capable of being wounded. That was not planned. But these are the discoveries we treasure — the ones that give stories character and specificity and make them unique. You cannot manufacture a finding like that, only be awake enough to recognise it when it appears.

Habras carries physical and emotional vulnerability at once. But it does not necessarily mean broken, just carries the possibility of it. Something habras is still whole — it simply doesn't pretend to be tougher than it is. It's an honest state of being.

This resonates particularly here, in the Nordic and Baltic cultural context, where understatement is not a weakness but a form of respect — where saying less, and meaning it completely, carries more weight than saying everything loudly. Where self-promotion is uncomfortable not because people lack confidence, but because performing too much confidence feels dishonest. Where the most trusted communication is the kind that doesn't try too hard.

These are not obstacles to good communication. They are the conditions for it. SARBAH was built inside this culture, understands it, and works from it — not around it.

One question runs underneath everything we do: does this feel true? If the answer is yes, we proceed. If not, we go back — not to refine, but to rethink.