About
A practice,
not an agency.
We are engaged for the occasion. We are actually engaged to change the conditions people are deciding in.
What we are engaged to do
Most clients come to us
for the occasion.
They have a date, a venue, a guest list and a budget, and they need someone capable to hold it together. That work is real and we do it well.
But the brief almost always understates the job. Behind the occasion there is usually something that has to happen — a relationship that needs to deepen, a decision that needs to feel safe to make, a team that needs to believe the year ahead is worth staying for. None of that is a logistics problem. It is a design problem, and it is settled well before anyone arrives.
So the first conversation is rarely about the venue. It is about what has to be true by the end of the evening, and who has to feel what in order for that to happen. The experience is then built backwards from the answer.
How an engagement runs
Three stages,
in this order.
The conversation
We ask what the occasion is for, who will be there, and what has to have changed by the end of it. If we are not the right practice for it, we say so here rather than three months in.
The design
The objective becomes an environment, a sequence and a set of decisions — documented, so that it holds whoever is delivering it.
The delivery
We deliver what we designed. Where an agency writes the strategy and hands it to a supplier, the same practice does both. Nothing is lost in the handover because there isn't one.
Grace Dagher
Founder and
Brand Experience Architect.
GD Events Group is led by Grace Dagher, who designs and delivers every engagement personally. Her background is in corporate events, hospitality and gifting, and the practice grew out of a frustration with how much money went into experiences that looked considered and felt like nothing at all.
She has hosted international groups of thirty, seventy and eighty people across Italy, China and Vietnam, and she travels with them. The same person who designs the itinerary is the one standing in the hotel lobby at six in the morning counting heads.
Grace is Sydney-based and works in English and Arabic.
The standard
What we hold to,
including when it costs us work.
We do not publish our client list, name our suppliers, or photograph a room without permission. Several of the organisations we work with would not engage a practice that did.
If a budget will not carry the brief, or a date will not work, we say so at the start. We would far rather explain it then than have a client notice it later.
The person who designs the experience delivers it. We do not sell a strategy and sub-contract the delivery.
We choose the organisations we work with by how they treat people, not by what they spend. It is the only filter that has ever held.
Begin a conversation
Every engagement
starts with a conversation.
Tell us what the occasion is for, who will be there and what has to be true by the end of it. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right practice for it.
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