While a career in event planning wasn’t purposefully chosen, Jimmie Galaites now creates events at Seattle’s Event Experience as creative director with drive, vision, and loads of ingenuity. A classically trained actor, Galaites was pursuing a life on the big stage when he stumbled into the world of meeting and event planning—a happy accident, you might say.
“My day job was being the tea captain at Lady Mendl’s Tea Salon in New York City,” he explains. “Lady Mendl’s offered daily high tea, and it was very popular for baby and bridal showers. So, I came to event planning by accident. At the salon, events were very much a carbon copy of each other—there were set start and end times, the menu was always the same, and the flow of each event followed the same script.” The sense of routine that came with these recurrent events provided the opportunity for Galaites to really learn the ins and outs of event production, and the experience proved to be the foundation on which he would later build his career.
A people person at heart, he came to Event Experience in 2015, first as an event producer, which required the skills to craft an event from conception to production. “It has the sound of theater,” he says. “I could flex my creative muscles and be around loads of people. Thankfully, I landed the job.” He was promoted to creative director two years later and now heads his own department, Fusion Games & Entertainment, which includes his traveling game show activity—a reflection of his passion for games and entertaining people.
When asked about a favorite event he was charged with producing, Galaites answered with ease. “I pitched and produced a holiday party with a ‘Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory’ theme. ‘Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory’—the 1971 version—is my favorite movie. I wanted the theme to be interactive, and we achieved this with the entertainment, the bar setup, and Instagram stations,” he explains. “We had several Instagram-worthy stations set up throughout the venue—a good egg/bad egg weigh station, [a replica of] lickable wallpaper (but not really because that would be gross), and a very large mockup of the chocolate tube Augustus Gloop gets stuck in. It was so much fun to be a part of a movie I love.”
