A Brief History Of Puppy Pride

2010 - Bristol Pride

In 2010 Kye, the owner of Puppy Pride, joined his first Pride parade in Bristol with his pup and some pup friends, as the only kinky group in the parade itself!

2011 - First Pride in London

Having moved jobs to London since 2010 it was decided to watch the Pride in London parade with pup & furry friends.  At the end of the parade we all joined in and walked in the parade route in gear!

Unfortunately no one at the time thought to photograph it.

2012 - The slow growth

After having great fun in 2011, we decided to do it properly this year and applied for a walking group in the parade.  We were asked to come up with a group name for it.  As we were pups in a pride march we went with the name Puppy Pride!

A short post on fetlife, and telling pups at clubs & events and we ended up with a small pack for our first officially registered Pride walk!

2013 - The beginning of Puppy Pride as you know it!

Following the success of 2012, and the fantastic feedback received via social media, we entered the Parade again and made sure to tell everyone we knew!

The turnout was fantastic, growing from a group of 12 in 2012 to 30 attendees!

Our First Logo

Our first logo was a silhouette of a pup superimposed over the Union Flag. Honestly there’s no great logic to it, we just wanted to make it a British website as there was nothing for pups in the UK at the time!

The First Website

After the parade was done it was mentioned that the UK pup community didn’t have an online home, and there was no real way to meet others outside of events.  Being a web developer I created the first version at PuppyPride.co.uk!

The first version launched in August 2013, just a few weeks after the parade and offered user accounts, event listings, photo galleries, blogs, and a forum!

We achieved just over 120 members in our first year of being live!

Fetch! London

Alongside launching the website we also started the first pup focused event in London, and possibly the first pup event in the UK!

We launched it in September 2013, using the new website to advertise it, and hosted at the Flying Dutchman Camberwell. 

We had dog beds, a cage, and lots of pup toys, as we started our first venture into running events.  Unfortunately due to venue issues the event closed in 2014, although it did put on a special event in 2015!

2014 - Slow But Steady

Not much changed in 2014, after the closure of Fetch! London we stopped running our own events and focused on growing our online presence, and helping to promote other pup events to help bring pups together.

Our Pride parade presence however continued to grow at a huge rate!

2015 - Continued Growth

We experienced explosive growth with both our online presence, and with the attendees at our Pride groups. We also continued adding more and more events to our event listings!

New Logo

In September we decided we needed a new logo, to have something cleaner, and clearer, than the pup silhouette on the flag. Also we were starting to have a more global user base, and needed something that would better fit the community we wanted to assist.

We settled on a stylised paw print, with a love heart for the base, to show the love involved in pups, set inside a tennis ball to show the playfulness of what pup play is about.

While the fonts used might have changed, we’re still using this icon to date, and have had it printed on hundreds of products, and show off in even more places!

Public Outreach

We started to attend other events in London, give talks on pup play and animal roleplay, in the general BDSM community. Trying to spread the joy of pups as far as possible!

We even managed to exhibit at Sexpo at Olympia, teaching attendees at the event what Pup Play was about. There were thousands of visitors over the weekend, and we hope that everyone who saw us there remembers how cute pups are.

2016 - The Resurgence!

Pup Out London

In 2016 we decided to restart running events outside of the pride parade and launched Pup Out London, using the store Expectations as our venue from February to May, when the store closed.  We then moved to the Three Tuns in Aldgate from September and stayed there until we outgrew the venue.

First Pride in London Pup Party

Alongside our Pride parade groups we also put on our first pre/post parade party at Doggett bar in London.  The old event listing is still online here: https://puppypride.social/events/151/prepost-london-pride-event.  

This was done so that we could start to provide a safe place for those walking with us to get changed, and leave their coats and bags during the parade. Unfortunately we didn’t take any photos of the party itself.

However our parade group itself again grew by massive amounts!

Opening Our Online Store

We launched our store in June, with the intent to sell a few t-shirts, and membership cards to give discounts in local stores.  With server costs growing, and more users to manage, we wanted to find a way to support ourselves, and be able to invest in the community while also making sure pups got something they loved.

Monthly Subscriptions on Patreon

With all the monthly bills to pay to keep Puppy Pride running, and with wanting to make sure that we gave back for everything we got, we started making monthly support packs!

Originally we launched these on Patreon, and the first one is shown below!

We’ve made a lot of changes and improvements to these packs over the years as we’ve grown.

2017 - New Store & Global Reach

Parade Numbers Capped

We moved our fetish party to Fire Vauxhall, in order to accommodate a large crowd for the annual party, and even hired a whole hog roast to feed everyone! 

We only had almost 150 pups in the parade, unfortunately limited by the local council imposing limits on the numbers of attendees allowed in the parade.

However, our party attendance almost doubled!

Expanding our global reach

As is the case with most online websites, we ended up with a global audience, not just from the UK that we started with.  This meant keeping our domain as .co.uk was not representative of our members any more.

With new TLD’s coming out all the time, we decided to move to https://PuppyPride.social, to better show off our aims of being a social network to bring pups together! We also moved the store to its own domain at https://PuppyPride.Store

We’re still using these domains to date!

Upgrading the subscriptions

In early 2017 we moved the subscriptions off of Patreon and onto the store! This gave us greater control of the prices, and dramatically cut costs so we had more money to invest in the contents.

We replaced the posters with t-shirts, and started making more customised items! Over time we’ve managed to make more and more awesome custom items!

The vast majority of custom items on the store began their life in a monthly pack.

2018 - The party grows

With the demand for the Pride party growing we moved into Draft House Chancery Lane (now Pup Out’s regular venue) to continue to provide a space for changing, bag storage, and so that everyone could party after the parade! 

Our parade group numbers were unfortunately limited by the number of wristbands that Pride in London would provide us, I’m sure we’d have had more otherwise!

Subscriptions get trinkets

Always in the effort to improve the monthly packs we added a smaller subscription tier and started to make badge packs every month, which could be subscribed to by themselves, and were also added to the larger pack sizes!

We eventually faded out the sweets, and started making enamel pins!

2019 - The Last Hurrah (Before Covid)

Our annual party was yet again held at Draft House again.  We started offering a sightseeing tour for those who couldn’t attend the parade itself due to the numbers cap, and this proved immensely popular to those who thought the parade was too long, as well as those who couldn’t get a spot.

2020 - The Year That Never Was

Unfortunately Covid hit, and we had to cancel all our events. There was no Pride, no party, no Pup Out.  We tried to help keep contact with the community with weekly quizzes and multiplayer games such as jackbox which allowed people to connect and interact with one another on Twitch, and supporting a range of online pup events including “The Secret Talent Of Pets”.

2021 - The Restart

After covid restrictions were relaxed in 2021, Pride in London was scheduled to happen in September so we organised our annual party at a new bigger venue!  However the parade itself was cancelled, but everyone who had tickets still wanted to come to the party!

In fact it was so popular we actually had more party attendees than in 2019!

2022 - Getting too big

In 2022, our party attendee pre-booked tickets almost doubled from 2021, with even more who got tickets on the day. It was an amazing party, but the venue was over crowded from the unexpected demand, and the work involved in getting an event like that done was getting too much to do mostly by one person, and so change was needed!

2023 - We went big for our 10th anniversary!

Pride Unbound*London launched

Following on from the previous year's success, and with feedback from the attendees overwhelmingly in favour of a longer event, we put together a team to team of volunteers to put on our first event weekend event, Pride Unbound*London.

The event was held at Theatre Deli, near the Gherkin, a massive venue with 13 rooms plus a bar!

We went from the 1 day event, with a few stalls, pup area, to a massive multiroom convention with a full dealers den, DJ’s, stage shows, talks, workshops, and an even bigger pup place and AB area!

The event was a massive success, and our attendees all gave overwhelmingly positive feedback on it.

We look forward to bringing you the event again, at a bigger location!

New Social Network

The original social website was looking quite dated, and thanks to big changes in software since 2013 not all the systems were functioning as well as they should.  So back in 2021 we started work on having a brand new custom built social network made for us!

This new system, which you’re probably all reading this on, came with a host of new features which we hope you’ll enjoy.  Some of these improvements include massively improved user profiles, new reworked forums for all social groups, and a NEW live chat system for both 1-1 chats and group chats!

We also launched a new digital only subscription for upgrades on the social network so that you can support Puppy Pride CIC and its work even easier than before.

Pride Photo Albums

Want to see the tens of thousands of photos of our Pride in London walks over the years? Check out the dropbox link here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/n6uikur473or7vx/AAC5GPc31ksz1eH4jPXNiXRta?dl=0