Brand participation in Pride without tokenism
Pride work carries real cultural and reputational risk. The answer is not louder visibility; it is more specific participation shaped by the people closest to the context.
Start with the people in the room
For a Berlin employee event, Countercult worked with the company’s LGBTQIA+ employee resource group rather than treating Pride as a generic seasonal brief. The group’s lived context became part of the creative and curatorial process.
That changes the question from “How do we look supportive?” to “What would make this gathering useful, enjoyable, and credible for the people it is meant to include?”
Specificity beats symbolism
A community-led approach can shape the artists, the format, the room, the food, the language, and the moments between the formal program. Each choice gives people a reason to feel that the event was made with them rather than staged around them.
Inclusion is felt in the decisions that happen before the camera arrives.
What brands should learn
Pride participation is not a permission slip to borrow a community’s symbols. It is an opportunity to support a real community in a way that is accountable to the people who will experience the work.
That requires listening early, compensating creative labor fairly, and accepting that a credible event may be less universal-and more meaningful-than a generic campaign.
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Adapted from the original Zalando Pride case study, published 13 January 2026. The public source describes the approach and event context without publishing a performance dataset.
This piece was informed by Shona Neary’s writing, conversations, and thinking around independent culture, artists, and place.
editorial process: Our Journals are pulled from our writings over the years to get information out as quickly and as widely as possible, and to get to what matters: finding each other and claiming our seat in the circular economy. Some ideas overlap between Shona Neary's work on cultural infrastructure and their artist practice as Sketchy Shona. AI is a tool for infrastructure, not for creating Journal writing or artists' work. We welcome original reporting and pitches from journalists and independent publishers.