Every discipline under one roof, held to a single standard.

O·ku began in a school hall in Cairo, where a thirteen-year-old sat through a half-hour talk on marketing that his father had been invited to give, and walked out decided. If it hadn't been marketing, he says, it would have been architecture. In the end it was a little of both.

That same year his father, after a career across marketing, hospitality and tourism, set out to open an agency of his own, and his son claimed the branding. Alaa found the name, Xtreme Advertising, and drew the first logo himself in a paint program with little more than instinct. It was his first taste of what a name and a mark could do, and it never wore off.

His career began where the story did, with years inside his father's agency, learning the trade from the floor up before he held a title anywhere else. From there he moved through some of the region's biggest agencies and the accounts that come with them: Black & Decker, Stanley and DeWalt across the Middle East, North Africa and South Africa; DHL Egypt; the launch of a US single-origin food company's flagship product; and a Canadian technology firm whose device was the first in the world to detect COVID in the air of a room. Years of work across four continents, in Arabic and English, turned running accounts into running agencies, with their teams, clients and contracts.

Taste, for him, has never been a slogan. At twenty-three he opened Egypt's first vegan restaurant, written up across the press, and his second restaurant earned a full episode of El Akil, Egypt's best-known food show. He ran both kitchens himself, on his own recipes, and anyone who has run a kitchen understands standards the way this agency practises them, enforced daily and under pressure.

His range goes well beyond strategy. He directs, shoots and edits film, photographs, designs, produces and engineers sound, and writes the code behind the websites in our work. He also builds, in the literal sense, sets, objects and spaces. One person doesn't need to do everything, but a director who has done the work can't be fooled about it, and that is why nothing at O·ku is briefed out.

In 2022 his father retired, and the agency came back to the boy who had named it and grown up inside it. He took a house of old-school print, rebuilt it for this century and, in time, gave it a new name. Today he leads O·ku from inside the work. He has sat in every chair his team now fills, and each of them was hired to a bar he has cleared himself.