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How L'Oreal's Signs of Pride Turned Employee Stories Into Art
L'Oreal's Signs of Pride campaign pairs four employees from the brand's Out@L'Oréal employee resource group with four LGBTQ+ artists to transform personal Pride experiences into handmade signs carried at the Campaignsoftheworld.clapboard.com/archive/stockholm-pride-los-santos-pride-travel">New York City Pride March on June 24, 2018, creating a piece of employee-led advocacy work developed by agency Kettle and distributed across social channels throughout June 2018 in the United States.
The campaign operates on a straightforward but considered premise. L'Oreal USA employees are not simply represented at the march — they are its creative originators, according to Glossy Co. Each participating employee spends time in conversation with their paired artist in the weeks leading up to the march, sharing personal reflections on what Pride means to them. Those conversations become the raw material for the artwork. The resulting signs are not branded merchandise or marketing props but individually authored pieces that carry the voice of the person who walked with them, according to coverage published by Glossy on July 5, 2018.
The four LGBTQ+ artists involved — Adam J. Kurtz, Loveis Wise, Mohammed Fayaz, and Isabel Castillo Guijarro — each bring a distinct visual identity to the project, according to Gcimagazine. That diversity of artistic voice is deliberate. Rather than a unified aesthetic, Signs of Pride presents four separate creative encounters, each shaped by a different human story. In the United States, where corporate participation in Pride parades had become a subject of scrutiny by 2018, this structural choice distinguishes the campaign from standard rainbow-branded activations. The work is produced not for the consumer but from the employee — a distinction that Kettle and L'Oreal make central to the campaign's identity. Campaigns of the World noted the initiative in August 2018 as a meaningful example of employee-led Pride participation. The campaign earns a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100.
L'Oreal USA grounds Signs of Pride in an internal community rather than a consumer-facing insight. Out@L'Oréal, the company's LGBTQ+ employee resource group, provides both the participants and the structural logic of the campaign, according to Makeup. By routing the initiative through an existing internal network, Kettle and L'Oreal USA create a layer of organisational credibility that purely external campaigns cannot replicate.
The strategic context matters. In the United States in 2018, beauty brands faced growing pressure to demonstrate that Pride-adjacent marketing reflected genuine institutional commitment rather than seasonal positioning. Competitors including Unilever — which held beauty sales of approximately $21.5 billion globally that year, according to loreal-finance.com — and Estée Lauder Companies, which reported approximately $12.8 billion in beauty sales, according to loreal-finance.com, were each pursuing their own inclusion narratives across the US market. L'Oreal's decision to build Signs of Pride around employee testimony rather than celebrity endorsement or product messaging represents a calculated departure from category convention. L'Oréal held the largest individual company position in global cosmetics, with $29.4 billion in worldwide cosmetics sales in 2018, according to loreal-finance.com, giving it both the scale and the institutional visibility to make employee-led work land with weight.
The choice of the New York City Pride March as the primary activation point is equally deliberate. As one of the most visible and attended Pride events in the United States, the march provides a public stage where the signs function simultaneously as personal expression and brand presence — without requiring the brand to claim the foreground. The social-content rollout that follows extends the reach of each individual story beyond the march itself, allowing the narratives developed in private conversation between employees and artists to circulate publicly across platforms during June 2018, as reported by Glossy.
Signs of Pride is built on a process of creative translation. Each of the four participating LGBTQ+ artists receives a personal narrative from a L'Oreal USA employee and converts it into a visual object intended to be carried through the streets of New York City on June 24, 2018. The work is inherently relational — the artist's hand is guided by someone else's experience.
Adam J. Kurtz, one of the four commissioned artists, brings a practice rooted in text-forward design and emotional directness to the collaboration. Loveis Wise, Mohammed Fayaz, and Isabel Castillo Guijarro each contribute their own formally distinct approaches, ensuring that Signs of Pride resists visual uniformity. The campaign does not present a single graphic identity or a coordinated colour system. Instead, it presents four encounters between an insider and an artist, made physical. That decision reflects a conscious craft choice: the signs are most effective when they read as individual rather than institutional.
The medium — hand-carried physical signs at a public march — is itself part of the creative strategy. Signs at Pride events carry a long cultural history in the United States as instruments of political expression and personal declaration. By commissioning artists to make objects that operate within that visual tradition, Kettle positions L'Oreal not as a sponsor of the march but as a participant in it. The social content that follows the march translates these physical objects into a digital narrative, extending each artwork's life beyond the day itself. Production credits for the full campaign are partially documented through coverage published by Campaigns of the World in August 2018 and reporting by Glossy, though a comprehensive production roster is not publicly available beyond the four named artists and the agency of record, Kettle.
No verified performance data for Signs of Pride is publicly available in terms of reach, engagement rate, or earned media value. L'Oreal USA and Kettle have not released campaign metrics in publicly documented sources, and no award-show results for this specific campaign appear in the available record.
What the structural evidence does support is an analysis of the campaign's likely effectiveness within its stated objectives. Signs of Pride is not designed to drive product sales or generate direct response. Its architecture is advocacy-first: establish institutional credibility within the LGBTQ+ community in the United States, demonstrate that Out@L'Oréal functions as a genuine internal force rather than a communications vehicle, and produce content with the authenticity markers — named artists, named employees, real conversations, real objects — that audiences in 2018 had begun to demand from corporate Pride participation.
The campaign's single media asset, as documented by Clapboard, concentrates the entire narrative into a focused content unit rather than distributing it across a fragmented multi-channel system. This compression is both a limitation and a choice. It prioritises depth over scale, which is coherent with the campaign's employee-story origins. Whether that choice generates the kind of durable brand association that L'Oreal's scale and market position can support is a question the available record does not resolve. The campaign scores 63 out of 100 on the Clapboard Score, reflecting the coherence of its strategic premise and the credibility of its creative approach against the constraint of its limited documented reach and single-asset execution.
Signs of Pride is a June 2018 L'Oreal USA campaign created by agency Kettle. It paired four Out@L'Oréal employees with four LGBTQ+ artists — Adam J. Kurtz, Loveis Wise, Mohammed Fayaz, and Isabel Castillo Guijarro — to create personal signs carried at the New York City Pride March on June 24, 2018.
Four LGBTQ+ artists collaborated on Signs of Pride in 2018. Adam J. Kurtz, Loveis Wise, Mohammed Fayaz, and Isabel Castillo Guijarro each partnered with a L'Oreal USA employee, translating that person's Pride experiences into a handmade sign carried at the New York City Pride March, as documented by Clapboard.
Kettle served as the agency behind Signs of Pride. The New York-based agency developed the campaign's concept and structure, connecting L'Oreal USA's Out@L'Oréal employee resource group with four LGBTQ+ artists and overseeing the social-content rollout across June 2018 in the United States, according to reporting by Glossy.
L'Oreal USA employees from Out@L'Oréal shared personal Pride experiences in conversations with paired LGBTQ+ artists in the weeks before the 2018 New York City Pride March. Those stories became the direct source material for artwork, which was then made into physical signs the employees themselves carried at the march.
No verified award-show results for Signs of Pride are publicly documented in available sources. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, reflecting its coherent strategic premise and credible creative approach, balanced against a limited single-asset execution and the absence of publicly available performance metrics.
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