IRWINDALE, Calif.—With just over 185 days before the 2025 Tournament of Roses Parade, Fiesta Parade Floats—the annual procession’s “most awarded float builder”—has been removed as an authorized designer due to its “failure to meet financial and technical criteria,” organizers said.
The decision by the Tournament of Roses Association, which oversees the parade and the football game that follows, comes barely six months after the Irwindale-based designer won awards for all five of the floats it created for the January 2024 parade.
The firm and its founder had been an authorized Rose Parade designer for more than 40 years.
“We are grateful to Fiesta Parade Floats for their decades of service to the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Association and the Rose Parade,” Candy Carlson, communications director for the Tournament of Roses, told Pasadena Now. “We celebrate the amazing legacy of Fiesta Parade Floats, a legacy that we will never forget,”
The decision leaves the parade with two authorized designers, Phoenix Decorating Company in Irwindale and Artistic Entertainment Services in Azusa. In addition, several floats are designed and built by volunteers, including those for the cities of South Pasadena, La Cañada Flintridge and Downey.
It also means the company, which was established in 1988, will close its doors, leaving its 18 employees in limbo, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Fiesta Floats owner Tim Estes, 68, said his company has struggled financially since closing temporarily during the COVID-19 pandemic, saying the decision cost him roughly $3.2 million.
Mr. Estes was also hospitalized for nine weeks after suffering a fractured skull, seven broken ribs and enduring multiple surgeries following a motorcycle crash, the L.A. Times reported.
“I feel horrible,” Mr. Estes told the L.A. Times. “I feel horrible for my workers. I feel bad for my clients who depended on us to build nice floats ... I feel like I’ve let them all down.”
The company’s website credits Mr. Estes with more than “40 years of experience building floats. Fiesta Parade Floats president, Tim Estes, has personally overseen the construction of over 500 Rose Parade floats. Working hand-in-hand with a team of world-renowned designers, and year-round support staff, Fiesta Parade Floats surpasses all other builders in floral technology, application, and animation.”
Fiesta Parade Floats was already creating designs for the 2025 parade, work that will either be turned over to the two remaining authorized designers or created through other means.
