House of the dragon: How the Portland Fire found its mascot

Late last month, the Portland Fire, the city’s newly revived WNBA team, made like Daenerys Targaryen and hatched a dragon.

The team’s first-ever mascot, a dragon named Rose that breathes glitter, made her debut only a few weeks ago, but her lore dates back 24 years to 2002, when the original Portland Fire team played its last game before folding. According to the team, Rose lay dormant under the city ever since.

Of course, Rose isn’t real, but with the effort that many modern teams across leagues—especially the WNBA—are putting into developing their mascots, it may be easy for fans to believe she is.

“It was definitely something that we knew we needed to stick the landing on for our fans,” Kimberly Veale, SVP of marketing and communications for the Fire, told Marketing Brew. “There’s an expectation with the WNBA mascots now…There’s only so many [times] within pro sports where you get a chance to make big, public splashes like this one, and we certainly didn’t want to let that opportunity pass us by.”

Dragon’s in the details

Veale, who joined the Fire after helping to build the Golden State Valkyries’ brand, told us that when her team first started concepting the mascot months ago, they debated between a couple of different approaches. One was centered on leaning into the nature that’s representative of Oregon–a common theme among the state’s other sports mascots, which include the Duck from the University of Oregon, as well as the Trail Blazers’ Blaze the Trail Cat and Douglas Fur (a Big Foot–style creature inspired by Douglas Fir trees). The other path placed more emphasis on the team name and brand.

After conducting focus groups and holding many internal discussions, they decided on a dragon, which nods to the team name, has appeal outside of Oregon, and also encompasses some of the signature Portland quirkiness, Veale said.

The Fire also put quite a bit of thought into exactly how Rose would be introduced to the fans, ultimately leaving a trail of clues around Portland. In the days leading up to her debut, Rose left scorch marks and pink glitter throughout the city, which fans and local media noticed. Some of those markings bore a faint resemblance to the Fire logo, prompting speculation about a mascot announcement, Veale said.

The hints all led to the Fire’s home at the Moda Center, where Rose emerged at the team’s Aug. 23 game against the Washington Mystics to much fanfare.

“The second our game experience team started setting up—they were rolling out the pink glittered carpet, and the video started to play with her blue nails and her pink scale hand going across the screen—the place went nuts,” Veale said. “I had chills.”

Color coded

Figuring out Rose’s coloring was another significant part of the process. The Fire collaborated with the Pantone Color Institute to create a signature hue called Rose Pink that’s meant to capture the mascot’s joyful and playful personality.

Rose, and much of the Fire’s branding, is unapologetically pink, a color that’s traditionally been associated with femininity, and therefore a choice that Veale said she and her team considered. “There were conversations about merch,” she told us. “Are we only going to be…talking to a subset of our audience [with this branding]?”

But red is the team’s foundational color, a callback to the original iteration of the fire, and pink is unique to the new era, so the team ultimately decided to lean into the color with Rose. So far, it seems to have been the right call.

“Just because it’s the WNBA, doesn’t mean pink is off-limits,” Veale said, adding that one of the first fans Rose ever interacted with on the night of her debut was a man in a pink shirt. They gestured back and forth about their matching color, Veale said, “and I had this moment of, ‘Okay, we’re past that standard-norms color definition in this space.’”

Beyond just physical attributes like color, the bar for a pro sports team’s mascot has arguably never been higher. Thankfully for the Fire, its mascot has wings.