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is the third largest Pride festival and parade in California celebrating the LGBTQ+ community. Their mission is to show the wider community that diversity builds a stronger and healthier society.

For 2022, the organisers joined forces with brand experience agency , giving the LGBTQ+ community a new platform to share stories and experiences, creating deeper awareness of the rich and layered Pride history.

Long Beach Pride wanted to set a new standard for Pride festivals all over the world. With that ambition, they charged Cogs & Marvel with the task to completely reimagine the annual parade experience. They knew they needed to attract a new generation and community of guests and allies, and to showcase the history of Pride as a protest – not just a modern-day party.

We spoke with Cogs & Marvel’s US Creative Director, Sheila Milani, about the activations created for this year’s Pride festival.

“For so many years,” Milani says, “Long Beach Pride was a parade with vendors and live musical acts. But this year, we started talking to the organisers about creating dimensional activations for people to experience – educational, inspirational activations that bring Pride to life. They had never done that before and they really wanted to offer the community a more layered experience.”

The aim was to create an experiential journey to inspire, engage, and educate the entire community – made with love. The theme for the festival became ‘many voices, one spirit’.

Milani explains the initial inspiration: “Upon first visiting the event site, we visualised a series of domes running the length of the lawn, like vertebrae on a spinal column.” This led the creative team to associate the Eastern-inspired concept of chakras.

Using the idea of chakras as the foundation, the activations focused on spirituality, awareness, communication, love, wisdom, sexuality, and trust, turning each of them into powerful installations.

Cogs & Marvel designed a series of geodesic domes, each presenting an exhibition or activity inside, from a thought-provoking museum of Trans history to a drag inspired make-up station, and a booty-shaking silent disco.

The team weaved stories and perspectives together in a rich tapestry of learning, dance, play, music, narrative, art, and community action.

The Transcendence Dome was inspired by the ‘third eye’ chakra. Working with a trans woman of colour as curator, the creative team designed this pop-up museum featuring a graphical history of the community who pioneered trans rights and kicked off the original Pride movement.

Blank postcards were made available inside the dome, allowing people to send their thoughts and feelings to legislators in the US who’ve created discriminatory laws.

“The transcendence dome was extremely popular,” says Milani. “People were reading the stories, crying, it was such an emotional experience to watch them interact.”

To signal the chakras of the physical body, the team created a silent disco, inviting people to relax and dance.

For the heart, there was a drag make-up station sponsored by Benefit. Milani explained in more detail: “You’d go in, take a seat, and a drag queen would give a consultation and do your face. There was then a 360-camera at the centre, so afterwards, you could get your photo taken. The only way to exit the dome was down a runway so you’d strut your stuff on your way out.”

The Cogs team also partnered with Tony Zosherafatain who produced Trans In Trumpland. This documentary, which played throughout the event, investigates the impact of anti-trans policies on the lives of four transgender Americans during the Trump era.

Told through a road trip narrative across remote parts of the United States, Trans In Trumpland explores the grim realities of the trans experience in North Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, and Idaho.

Being innovative in a world full of content creators is a challenge, but Milani pointed out that her team didn’t want to simply hang the Pride flag or paint a rainbow floor as visitors might expect.

Instead, they added a little bit of colour throughout all of the frames at the entrance to resemble the pride rainbow in a new, fresh expression that referenced all the community flags of Pride.

With an eye on every detail of the activations, the team’s care and consideration paid off. Milani told me, “As designers, we don’t always get to see the things we design, but it’s so important to me that everyone who worked on the activation was there. That’s where you can see what worked, what didn’t work, and what could have been done better. Seeing the response to what we designed, it confirmed everything we’d worked on, and the message that we were trying to amplify.”

It was clear from interviewing Sheila that at the heart of this event was a community whose voice hasn’t always been understood.

The transcendence dome, the postcards, the drag queen station, all of these activations were heartfelt and honest.

“There’s so much pain and despair in this community, but there’s also so much hope and joy and being able to provide a couple of days where people could enjoy that is so powerful. It was a place to reflect and celebrate, and watching people experience it was so poignant,” said Milani.

“Authenticity seems to be a buzzword right now, but ultimately, if the customer is at the heart of what you’re doing and you’ve listened to them, the results will come.”

Cogs & Marvel did hear the customer. They created activations that gave everyone a chance to learn, to listen, and to understand what the LGBTQ+ community is about, and what they’ve been through. It was very refreshing to speak to a company who genuinely cared about the work they were producing and the positive impact it could make.

After two years without a physical presence, Long Beach Pride smashed every single metric set. Over 25,000 tickets were sold, hitting a 63% increase from the last ticketed Long Beach Pride event, and a 248% increase in revenue.

“It was an enormous success in every regard,” said Milani. “From attendance to finances to attendee sentiment, with tons of people going online to comment how much more they enjoyed this than the more traditional parade-and-party format of nearby Los Angeles Pride.”

Long Beach Pride took an extra step for their 2022 festival. By working with Cogs & Marvel, the event organisers elevated the meaning of Pride for the LGBTQ+ community, while also educating the wider community in an engaging, interactive way. Can we all take extra steps to better understand each other as Long Beach Pride did? Has a new standard been set for Pride festivals?