The Torrance Rose Float team is gearing up for the 2025 Tournament of Roses. This year’s float, modeled on the theme “Best Day Ever,” is the 68th float from the City of Torrance to participate in the annual parade.

The process begins in September with the first meeting to start planning the next year’s float. During the fall, Torrance high school students are invited to submit concept drawings for the float.

“We get all the entries and we review them,” says Roseanne Villalobos, who has been participating in the float for 15 years and currently serves on the board as the co-director of hospitality. “Some of them are fantastic, but we just can't afford to build them. We ask them to give us a paragraph of what it means to them, and from that, we select a float that we can build and that our float builder says is doable.”

The student with the winning design gets to see their idea come to life — and they get a spot on the float during the parade.

However, there is a long road from concept to finished product, and it all happens within the span of a couple months. First, the float builder creates the foundation for the float and then there is a spray foam process to prepare the float for the top layer of decorations.

Most of the work happens in the period of a week. Between Christmas and New Year’s Day, volunteers flock to the float to decorate it with the natural products — seeds, bark, flowers and more — that the Rose Parade is known for.

“Starting the day after Christmas to the day before New Year's, we start going like crazy,” Villalobos says. “We work from eight in the morning till eight at night and decorate all day.”

This is where the fine details come in. Every flower, seed and piece of bark is placed on the float by hand, breathing life into the float and bringing it to the product people see rolling through Pasadena on the day of the parade.

The competition judges the floats the day before the parade, and Villalobos and some other dedicated volunteers opt to stay overnight with the float prior to the parade to ensure every flower remains untouched after days of hard work.

Villalobos says the flurry of days leading up to the parade consists of a lot of challenges. It is all hands on deck — they normally have about 200 volunteers on a daily basis helping to decorate so they can get it all done.

“Every single spot has to be covered in a natural product. You can't have anything showing that is not natural, and that's a challenge,” Villalobos says. “The fine detail work is a lot of work, but in the end, it looks awesome. I really wish everybody could see them up close and personal, because when you see it on TV, you just see the color. You don't really see the fine detail work. These people put in hours and hours to do one square foot of something. The patience of the people [is amazing].”

However, Villalobos says the most difficult obstacle they encounter does not have to do with decorating — it is monetary. Though the City of Torrance supplies the organization with some money, the Torrance Rose Float board needs to do additional fundraisers throughout the year to cover additional costs. They mainly rely on their Restaurants for Roses program, in which restaurants donate a portion of people’s bills toward the float.

Though funding is always a challenge, Villalobos and the board put in the effort to keep the float going year after year because of the impact it has on the community. For many, it is something that parents can do with their children since decorators can start as young as 13.

“For us, it's a big family affair,” says Melissa De LaVara, who has been decorating for about a decade. “It's something we look forward to every year, so that's great for us as a family to do that. I look forward to [seeing the float] go from a fiberglass shell to seeing the different stages of when all the seeds are put on, and then all the flowers — they really, truly come to life. And you don't see that behind the scenes when you're watching the parade. I love the behind the scenes and putting it all together and saying, ‘Oh, I know how they put that flower together.’ So that part I really love.”

The decorating process brings together more than just the city of Torrance — various people with ties to the community are invited to participate.

“There are so many people who want to decorate. It's just such a fun city, and you don't have to live in the city to decorate,” says Carol Gilles, secretary of the Torrance Rose Float committee. “That's the most important thing. You do not have to be a citizen of Torrance in order to decorate, you can be anywhere in Southern California.”

This year, Villalobos says she will be riding on the float for the first time. The future of the Torrance float is uncertain from year to year, and she does not want to have any regrets. The 2026 float is expected to be much more costly as they transition to a new float builder, and costs might continue to rise in future years. But for those like Villalobos who come back year after year to participate, this is a tradition they hope to never lose.

“It really brings a lot of community together,” Villalobos says. “It's really funny because we don't see each other [except] this one time of year, and it's almost like you're never away from each other. And we have people that have moved away, and they literally have a family vacation every year to come back and decorate the float.”

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Bio:

Emily McGinn is a journalist based in the Los Angeles area. She enjoys reporting on and writing about a variety of topics from lifestyle to news, especially in her areas of specialty, environmental science and political science.