Remembering Past Awards: 2018

New Faces, Two Dinners, and Ole Ortoarea!

Washington DC was the host city for our 2018 awards dinner. As in the previous the year, we decided to use the AAO Annual Session as the gathering point for both for the third Partner Meeting and the second Partner Awards dinner.

During the afternoon we gathered for the partner meeting. Presentations from Alan Kozlowski and Eric Ackerman were held either side of a truly spectacular and entertaining presentation by me. Eric had recently been named as OC’s Marketing Manager. He and the Marketing team used their talents to eliminate the chaos of the 2017 event and put together a partner meeting and award dinners that was better prepared and executed.

Eric wasn’t the only new face in 2018 to our distributor events. We welcomed new friends from Brazil to Croatia to Morocco to Panama to Serbia to Thailand to Turkey to Russia to Argentina. I was seeing many of you for the first time and I appreciated the energy and thoughtful exchange of ideas that you all brought to the partner meeting.

As befitting an event held in Washington DC, the awards nig

ht was held at the Lincoln restaurant. No high hats were worn (or shots fired), but we did have a welcome cocktail and a step-and-repeat for photos and selfies. Like 2017, we were cursed by too many people on a too small a stage, but we made it work. The energy from earlier in the day had definitely carried into the evening, with lots of drinking, laughter, and hearty applause for our deserved winners.

Sadly, a number of the winners were not able to be in DC. We decided therefore to hold a second awards dinner. This time Milan, Italy was the venue for our event. At the dinner we ate a lot of food and drank a lot of wine. We were also able to honor a number of award recipients, including our distributors from Portugal and Algeria. Also present were our second Diamond Award winner, Ortoarea from Spain. Muchas gracias to this handsome hardworking team. They were very worthy recipients of our highest honor and remain an important and special part of the OC family.