Our Story

AOK Events was founded in 2000 by Alex Hewitt, who had spent the previous 10 years working for other event agencies. With Jo Greenstock and Simon Hanbury they set up shop in a tiny, stiflingly hot office in Hammersmith and initially concentrated on being a corporate hospitality broker, but client demand meant they very quickly fledged into the full service event management company that we still are today.

Whilst setting up a new company was easy, finding a good name for it was considerably harder. Just three weeks before we started trading, we still had no name but Alex overheard a programme on Radio 4 that his wife was listening to, which explored the origins of a number of well-known acronyms, one of which was the phrase “AOK”. The phrase describes a well-known hand signal (using your thumb and middle figure) that was created by American World War 2 fighter pilots, which signaled to Air Traffic Control as they were landing their planes back onto aircraft carriers, that their plane and crew were “in perfect working order”. It was an apt phrase that summed up our approach to the organisation of events.