When the Rose Festival looked to get out of the float-building business for cost-cutting purposes, three years after entering into it, officials knew who to call.

Nate Leigh and Yacita Simonsen had been involved in float building for many years. Leigh, in fact, has been championing the title “floatsmithing.”

So, PDX Rose Fabrication LLC was born with building Rose Festival parade floats at the top of its list of big jobs. Hopefully, it will line up other work, but Leigh said he and Simonsen happily help out the festival for all it has done for them, considering its shaky financial picture.

The float building transaction was completed on March 3.

“We’ve been talking, after the 2024 season, about the situation as it stood,” said Leigh, who’s been helping build floats since 2001 as a welder and “classically trained” sculptor. “Yacita and I have been invested in the creative fabrication scene in Portland for 20 years. When the Rose Festival said it’s time to pass the torch, we said, ‘Where do we sign? It’s a tradition, we’ll be damned if it goes down on our watch.”

Both worked for the Rose Festival and Gene Dent and his float business before that. Now, it’s their business.

“In the 1990s, I started as a volunteer decorator; I had a Girl Scout troop and we’d bring them down every year to help decorate. One year they said, ‘Hey do you want a job?’ It sounded like fun. It’s been fun ever since,” Simonsen said.

Leigh has taken on the title of director. “I don’t know if I can call myself Grand Poobah,” he joked. Simonsen is all things operations management. Both want to help the Rose Festival survive and thrive, business-wise.

“This is a cornerstone of the cultural aspect of Portland,” said Leigh, a Portland resident. “I’ve lived here longer than anywhere else. As a creative, I’ve chosen Portland. This kind of endeavor helped me through a lot of creativity and difficulty, because of friendships and relationships made through the Rose Festival.

“We want every creative in the region to participate and get a piece of it.” That’s why he calls it “floatsmithing,” giving it a trade name. “We have a coalition of floatsmiths up and down the West Coast.”

There are still employees and volunteers working on floats for Rose Festival parades. (Other float builders have entries in the parades, not just PDX Rose Fabrication.)

“This is really exciting. We are looking forward to the future, we want to make sure this (Grand Floral) Parade goes on for another 118 years,” said Simonsen, a Milwaukie resident.