Pride and Pickleball Let Creative Agency Happylucky Include Everyone
Co-owners Emily Stutzman and Ben Hennes used experience building events for Adidas, On, and other brand partners to make their venue an intersection of sports, culture, people, and ideas.
One of the key plays in any sports marketing campaign is hospitality.
During an event that Portland, Oregon-based creative agency Happylucky held for one of its brand partners, co-owner and Chief Creative Officer Ben Hennes saw the event’s lead producer recognize someone there from a previous event, remembered their favorite sandwich from a prior conversation, and fetched them the sandwich before they could even ask.
“To me, that is what hospitality is: It’s making people feel really seen and like recognized for who they are,” Hennes said. “It’s always the attention to detail.”
Happylucky first opened in 2004, but Hennes and current CEO Emily Stutzman bought the agency from founder Toni Smith in 2021—presenting themselves to partners as a women-led, queer-owned, full-service creative agency. With the perspective of “jocks that are queer, and we’re from the country,” Hennes and Stutzman used their experience navigating seemingly disparate underserved communities to find their intersections.
We were throwing these parties for global brands all over the country, and we’re like ‘Why aren’t we bringing that expertise to our own community and showing what we can do and bringing people into these experiences that are so special and elevated?’
Emily Stutzman, CEO, Happylucky
With a major partner in Adidas, for example, Happylucky has worked with their brand purpose team to complement large activations like a World Cup putt-putt course at New York’s Hudson Yards with years of Pride campaigns, women’s athletics and Title IX work, as well as social justice resources within Black and Hispanic communities. For Adidas’ annual conference in Seattle, Happylucky brought in nonprofit Athlete Ally to host LGBTQ+ athletes sharing their experiences with other attendees.
The agency has held relay races for footwear brand On and shipped out Formula 1 jackets for Apple, but it saw an opportunity to use its skills and resources for the benefit of its connected communities. At its offices on Portland’s Central Eastside, Happylucky has a large warehouse-sized space behind garage doors that, in 2024, it opened during a neighborhood Pride event and hosted food trucks, cooling stations, DJs, drag performances, dance beats, clothing vendors, and more. The space’s name: Now Serving.
A few months later, with Hennes and Stutzman frustrated by a lack of adequate, well-located pickleball venues in town, they taped down some court lines inside Now Serving, put up some nets, and partnered with Portland’s Lesbian Culture Club on drop-in pickleball nights.
Happylucky is now throwing annual Portland Pride parties of its own, and Now Serving is hosting not only pickleball leagues and lessons on two real, non-tape hard courts, but also offers the facility’s courts, bar, and lounge for basketball games and dance parties.
“We were throwing these parties for global brands all over the country, and we’re like ‘Why aren’t we bringing that expertise to our own community and showing what we can do and bringing people into these experiences that are so special and elevated?’” Stutzman said. “How do we show people this cool stuff we’re doing, have other people experience it, and have it not be for a consumer purpose or to sell a shoe?”
Dink happy thoughts
Happylucky has long known how to cater events to specific sports audiences. Its women’s volleyball work with Adidas has included stars from League One Volleyball (LOVB), high school and collegiate talents, and the Spikes Under the Lights tournament at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, that drew 60,000 fans, a dozen sponsors, viewers across Turner Sports channels, and a $1 million purse for the four competing teams. The latter included merchandise and on-court branding designed by Happylucky.
When Adidas showed up at the Athletes Unlimited Softball League (AUSL) preseason camp, Happylucky turned it into a pool party with a DJ, gear for players, the Women’s College World Series projected over the pool and a giant floating softball.
Building Now Serving’s pickleball courts, however, began with an audience of two. Hennes and Stutzman were in a Portland pickleball league together and kept coming across courts that were either subpar or poorly located for their needs. Some excelled as multi-use facilities, but were basically “basketball courts with 8,000 different court lines on them.”
Some of the better courts in the Portland area are either outside the city center or in the deep suburbs.
“As people that are diehard inner Portland people and committed to this area, we saw an opportunity for something that was more central to the city and where our communities live, play, and gather,” Hennes said.
They laid down tape courts, began hosting drop-in nights with Lesbian Culture Club, and brought in occasional tournaments—including a fundraiser for Hennes’ queer softball league. Stutzman said Now Serving established roots when Kendra Freeman, the founder of Portland’s Dink Pony Club, contacted her about a regular home for the league and tried the courts at Now Serving with her wife and some friends.
The league loved the space, but wanted Happylucky to install true pickleball courts—which Stutzman said were a $15,000 investment. Freeman and Dink Pony Club committed to two full seasons, which paid for much of the cost of the courts. Quickly, Dink Pony Club’s schedule was supplemented by other Portland leagues including Queer Courts and, through queer-community word of mouth, basketball league Ball Out Portland, queer hip hop collective Let Her Cook PDX, and The Hoop Bus.
Happylucky’s clients have enjoyed the space as well. Hennes and Stutzman said that teams from Stanley and Tillamook have been to Now Serving, while the head of global basketball communications for Adidas brought her team to play just recently. Scheduling remains the facility’s primary obstacle, with Happylucky trying to coax leagues and partners into time slots beyond the peak after-work hours.
While Stutzman noted that the courts do “gentle marketing” for the agency by connecting with the community and clients “while we’re sleeping,” it’s welcoming conversation in unforeseen corners. Stutzman grew up in a Mennonite community on a farm in Lebanon, Oregon, and went to a gathering at her parents’ house a few weeks ago where her father was selling tickets to an oyster roast.
He sold the tickets through two auctions: One to a general audience, and another to “this very conservative school that’s got like 80 people, K through 12” who “wear the head coverings, cotton print dresses, [and] Reeboks.” Stutzman said she was nervous about attending the second auction because “they know who I am. I’m on the internet, they know about my business,” but she found herself in a conversation about pickleball.
“[It] just opened up the whole purview because everybody loves pickleball,” she said. “That was just like a very cute connection where then suddenly we had this thing in common and everybody dropped their guard, and what we can connect over is the sport we all love… I just thought that was special.”
Freaks and folks welcome
Hennes connected to pickleball through a group of serious players who typically use courts in Portland’s Columbia Park, but seek indoor space when the city’s notoriously rainy season begins. He noted that, being “a very cis gay man,” his pickleball group tended to reflect a specific social circle.
As Now Serving brought in Dink Pony Club, Queer Courts, and other groups—and designed tournaments to appeal to players at multiple skill levels—he saw more diverse teams coming onto the courts and the sport and space “connecting groups that are often pretty siloed.” Happylucky saw similar potential for its Pride parties as well.
That’s mine and Ben’s secret life mission: How do we build that bridge between rural communities and urban communities and liberal and conservative.
Emily Stutzman, CEO, Happylucky
After the first event in 2024, Happylucky returned with a more elaborate Pride concept for 2025: Queers from the Country. The block party paired DJs and drag queens with country karaoke, a mechanical bull, line-dance queens, and tailgating for both a nod to Hennes and Stutzman’s rural roots and a means of connecting the communities where they grew up with their current home.
Originally from Missoula, Montana, Hennes goes back every year for the University of Montana homecoming game (despite never attending the school) and brings friends from Portland with him to meet family and watch football. Hennes describes his guests as “typically gay men that had some sense of fear of going to Montana at some point in their life” and some of the folks back home as having “never met an openly gay man or had very little exposure to them,” but recalled research during the arguments around California’s Proposition 8 eliminating marriage equality that found people to be more open-minded when they met and knew members of other communities.
“That’s mine and Ben’s secret life mission: How do we build that bridge between rural communities and urban communities and liberal and conservative,” Stutzman said. “Having both grown up in conservative environments in rural settings, recognizing those people as people with hearts and lives and families and living very similar to us—except with a different perspective—I think that we often forget that about each other.”
This year, Happylucky’s Certified Freak Pride block party put the word out through broad channels that it wanted artists, performers, creators, tastemakers, and the generally colorful people who make life worth living to be part of the festivities. The blend of music, costumes, ball pits, bubbles, and street circus packed the block while raising money for queer advocacy group Basic Rights Oregon.
Both Hennes and Stutzman view Now Serving as an extension of sports marketing’s hospitality even when both the sports and the marketing are at a minimum. Stutzman sees the space less as a sports facility and more as a clubhouse, where diverse groups with an intersection of interests within their neighborhood and the Portland queer community can comfortably be themselves.
Hennes sees room for even more attention to detail and adjustment to the needs of Now Serving’s growing guest list. Though conscious of the space’s tucked-away hidden-warehouse mystique, Hennes wants to revamp the entrance to make it more welcoming. He foresees customizing snacks by individual groups’ tastes and building community walls and Polaroid displays so regular groups can make the space their own.
“Just those little details to make people feel seen…making sure that we’re sharing all of the photos with you that are taken freely within the community to take and own and post after the fact, to say I was there, I was a part of this event, whether I was a performer or just someone that showed up and had a fabulous outfit,” Hennes said. “Celebrating those people on social media to be like ‘Hey this wasn’t something we just did, you’re part of making this event or pickleball thing what it was.’”
