By Robert Tomlinson
News Director
PASADENA, Calif. — One of the great American traditions on New Year’s Day has been the Rose Parade in Pasadena, Calif., which has been held on New Year’s Day nearly every year since 1890.
The parade features brightly-colored flower-adorned floats, marching bands, and equestrian units, and is watched by hundreds of thousands in-person and millions around the country and the world.
If you were one of those millions to watch this year’s parade, you may not have known that one of the floats, one that received a major award, had a Constantine graduate and former Sturgis flower shop owner as a key member of the design team.
Doug Bates, a 1996 graduate of Constantine High School and the former owner of the Design By Vogt’s flower shop in Sturgis, was the floral lead on the “Sharing Skills for Success” float from The UPS Store in the 2026 Rose Parade. That float was the winner of the Director’s Award, which goes to the most outstanding artistic design and use of floral and non-floral elements.
“It’s an honor for sure,” Bates said about the float winning an award in a phone interview Tuesday. “Knowing that your work is recognized, it’s fantastic. It’s really humbling to know that people like what I do.”
Bates, who now lives in Wheaton, Ill., has worked with Artistic Entertainment Services (AES), which is one of the commercial float builders for the parade, for the last two years, and has helped out with putting the finishing touches on just under a dozen floats since the 2023 parade. However, this year was the first time he was a lead on one of the floats, in which he is responsible for getting the flowers onto the float and managing the hundreds of volunteers who assisted with the float.
Being in that leadership position with a float in the parade, Bates said, was something he’s looked forward to for quite a while.
“I love being able to share the process with other people, because the amazing thing about the Rose Parade is it’s a project that is so much larger than any individual that’s there,” Bates said. “We’re creating something not only for the residents of Pasadena, but for the people of the world to be able to see and look at and admire. And that’s the whole purpose of art, to create something beautiful.”
Being part of the Rose Parade in some capacity, Bates said, was a “bucket list” item for him, especially since he grew up enjoying the parade in a sports-loving household while living in Three Rivers and Constantine.
“I loved watching the Rose Parade, because I knew that that was like, everything was flowers. This was before I was passionate about flowers or even involved in the floral industry, I just really thought the Rose Parade was kind of a fun thing,” Bates said. “It’s always been one of those things, especially after getting involved in the floral industry, that was like, I for sure want to do that, because just the skill and what it is that you can create using just floral organic botanical material is kind of amazing.”
However, it was a chance conversation he heard while helping a friend at a program at the Kentucky State Floral Association in 2022 that led him to becoming part of the creative team for a Rose Parade float.
“I heard somebody talking about the Rose Parade, and I just kind of casually mentioned, oh, that’s something that I would love to be involved in. My friend Michael was like, oh, if you’re serious, I can make that happen, I’ve got 800 volunteers who don’t necessarily know the difference between a rose and a carnation, but he was like, I really need another floral designer on our team,” Bates said, noting the friend passed along his contact info to someone at a company that predated AES. “I got home from Kentucky, and I got an email from them and I was on my way to Pasadena.”
For the 2025 parade, Bates said he was the co-floral lead on the Louisiana float, and this year handled the UPS Store float as the lone floral lead.
While it takes months to design and build the float, Bates said it’s “super easy” to incorporate the flowers into the design once it is built. He said he flew in to California on Christmas Day in order to begin the process of placing the flowers on the float, which took a few days to complete in a warehouse where all the floats are built and decorated. His son, Elijah, a design major at Western Michigan University, was one of the volunteers who helped out with placing the flowers.
Bates said the flowers are placed on a metal screen – similar to a window screen – that is sprayed with a foam-like material that is then painted, which acts as a base for inserting the decorations, which Bates said by the time he gets there is similar to a “paint by number.”
“You know, this pink section is your hot pink roses, this orange section is your orange marigolds, however it is they have it divided up,” Bates said. “The thing about the Rose Parade is that you’re not to have any sort of exposed metal or rough surfaces, it’s all supposed to be covered with some sort of organic or plant material. So, on the seahorses, we used both an orange and yellow lentil, and then shredded straw flower, shredded safflower, and there are different types of glue we use as well.”
Bates said for the UPS Store float, they used thousands of flowers, all of them natural, with some coming locally from California farms and some internationally.
During the judging of the floats, which took place the day before the parade, there was one other type of judge that was there to see their float – a judge from the Guinness Book of World Records. In the end, the float won a second award, the Guinness World Record for the largest animatronic fish at 28 feet high, 10 feet wide, and just over 12 feet deep.
While he was not involved in the part of the design process of the animatronic, Bates said being part of a Guinness World Record-holding float was something he was “stoked” about.
“One could say we kicked the ‘Jaws’ animatronic right out of the water,” Bates said.
While rain dampened the parade a bit this year for the first time in 20 years, Bates said the UPS Store float has been “by far” his favorite float to work on, especially as someone from a small community in rural Michigan.
“I’m just a fat kid from St. Joe County. I never expected certainly to be in the limelight for anything like this, to be able to create something that millions of people see,” Bates said. “It was an incredible experience and I will keep going back as long as they’ll have me.”
