The mandate
It started in 2016 with a favour: Lviv’s head of tourism asked me to help some Italians who were in town. They turned out to be the top management of a new airline. Step by step, as their operations scaled, our whole OK Factory team migrated to serving the company — most of the non-flight operations: partnerships, advertising on TV, web, radio and print, events, ticket sales. Handling and baggage were managed by others; everything else went through us. The president later called us “The Crazy Guys From Ukraine.”
What we built
Promotion across TV, web, radio, print and events — including a national Christmas TV spot produced in three days. After two years of trying, Ernest became the aviation partner of the Leopolis Jazz Festival in year three. We also designed a smart baggage sizer — programmable sensors creating a “virtual cage,” with integrated weight sensors — built the prototype with Ukrainian engineers and patented it. And the first million tickets were sold on a website everyone said an airline couldn’t run on WordPress.
The route launches
Every inaugural route from Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa and Kharkiv was celebrated with a party at the gate — cake, spritz and live music in the boarding area. Once, the president liked our saxophonist so much that he put him on the first flight to Ibiza, to play at thirty thousand feet.
Working with government and airports
An underappreciated part of airline marketing is the relationship with city and regional administrations, airport operators, and national aviation authorities. We worked across all of it — route development meetings, slot negotiations, regulatory submissions — for every new destination.
What I carried into the next jobs
Ernest was not a failure; it was a school of operational excellence. The licence was revoked, then March 2020 closed the skies — and there never was a “last flight.” Three lessons stayed with me. Every detail counts: the Armani team taught us the story of an olive worth $40,000 a year to American Airlines. To be irreplaceable, one must always be different. And when everything goes wrong, you bounce forward — the lesson that saved us again two years later.