Zesty Events Named a Top 5 Event Management Agency in Spice Magazine's 2026 Hot 100
Recognised Among Australia's Best
Zesty Events named a Top 5 Event Management agency in Spice Magazine's 2026 Hot 100.
Big news this week: Zesty Events has been named one of Australia's top five in the Best Event Management category in Spice Magazine's 2026 Hot 100 Services & Suppliers.
If you're not familiar with it, the Hot 100 spans 20 categories across the Australian events industry, from styling and staging through to catering and, in our case, event management. Each category has five joint winners. No single company takes the top spot, which is exactly what makes the list interesting. It's less a leaderboard and more a snapshot of who the industry itself rates.
That distinction matters to me. Client testimonials are gold, and I don't take a single one for granted. But the Hot 100 isn't voted on by clients. It's voted on by the people who work in this industry: venue managers, suppliers, stylists, AV crews, other planners. The people who see what actually happens behind an event, not just the finished result. Being named among the country's best event management agencies by that audience is a different kind of validation, and honestly, a more nerve-wracking one to earn.
What the recognition means for Zesty Events
It also feels like a good moment to talk about where the Australian events industry is at. Experiential events and brand activation have grown up a lot in the last few years. Clients aren't just booking a marquee and calling it a launch anymore. They want a brand activation agency that understands strategy, guest experience, and execution all at once, and they want a partner who can do that in Melbourne, Sydney, or wherever the brand needs to show up.
The bar has gone up across the board, which makes a peer-voted list like this one worth more than it would have five years ago.
Recognition built across many different events
This one isn't tied to a single event for us either. It's not because we ran one big activation this year, it's the accumulation of everything, from a 400-person charity luncheon at 1 Hotel Melbourne, a conference for Airbnb, and a gala dinner for S.Pellegrino, to the smaller projects that never make it onto a case study page but still had to be right.
Every one of those jobs is where the standards actually get set, long before anyone from Spice Magazine is watching.
Staying boutique and hands-on
As the founder of a boutique agency, I still run a lot of this myself, from the first sales conversation through to the load-out. So this recognition lands a bit personally. It's proof that staying boutique and hands-on doesn't mean staying under the radar, and that the relationships built project by project add up to something the wider industry notices.
None of it happens without the clients who've trusted Zesty with their events, some of them more than once, and without the suppliers, venues, and crews who show up and make the work look easy when it rarely is.
Thank you to all of you, and to Spice Magazine and the industry for the recognition.
Onwards to more great things.