Pantone owns the monopoly on every tint, tone, and shade you've ever seen. Now it wants to control the colors you'll see in the future.
The Pantone factory is to color what Willy Wonka's is to candy. Rising up from the New Jersey marshlands, the 80,000-square-foot plant turns out millions of paint chips and fabric swatches a year. In the testing lab, a mad-science contraption pumps rainbows of liquid through dozens of clear tubes into shiny steel canisters. On the factory floor, 30-yard bolts of fabric churn in steaming baths of orange, purple, and blue. A printing press squirts 72 inks at once onto seemingly endless reams of paper, which emerge brilliantly striped, each hue stamped with its number and ink-mixing formula in tiny black type.
Bound into flip books and binders and decks of swatch cards, these reference strips are the color genome of consumer culture. Pantone codes define the shade of every car, sneaker, and corporate logo. Starbucks green, Gap blue, and Barbie pink are the same everywhere for a reason. Pantone's system ensures that 16-1359 Orange Peel in Germany is identical to 16-1359 Orange Peel in Brazil, that an ad campaign launched on Madison Avenue color-matches the cell phones manufactured in China. If color is a language, Pantone is the Oxford English Dictionary — thousands of shades, from almond blossom to walnut, that can be printed, woven, or extruded anywhere in the world.
Though Pantone doesn't sell inks, dyes, or paints, it has come to hold a monopoly on color. Of course, frequencies of light, like naturally occurring sounds, are free for anyone to use. But Pantone owns their names — or, more specifically, their designated numbers and spectro-photometric descriptions. Ultimately, printers and manufacturers have to translate those numbers into atoms — pigment, dye, or varnish. In order to check that the final product matches the design spec, there needs to be an agreed-upon point of reference. And that's what Pantone sells, to designers of every kind and a thousand ink licensees in 65 countries — a standard reference, in the form of $3,600 cotton-swatch binders, $150 fan decks, and $300 chip books. The Pantone system is embedded in 3-D modeling software and applications like Photoshop and Quark, as well as monitors and inkjet printers.
We don't tend to think of paint chips as information infrastructure. Yet when everyone in the world is using the same ones, they become a communications protocol. The effect is equivalent to that of any network standard — it amplifies the scale and interconnectedness of how things get made. It greases the wheels of big, fast global culture.
WHAT'S THE HAUTE NEW HUE? PANTONE WILL PROVIDE EXPERT ADVICE — FOR A PRICE.
What makes a color hot? How does tangerine become the hip shade of the season? Or aubergine? Or slate? Why do the windows of every Gap and Eddie Bauer go smoke blue in unison? It's as if there's a Trilateral Commission of color somewhere out there. And that's not far from the truth. Fashion designers, product developers, interior decorators — many of them look to the same coterie of color forecasters for help in selecting the hues of tomorrow. "There are just a few key players, ranging from individuals like Li Edelkoort in Paris to organizations like the Color Association of the US," says Jay de Sibour, president of the Color Marketing Group. "But across all industries, billions and billions of dollars ride on color decisions."
For years, officials at Pantone fielded calls from designers and color forecasters. What's the haute new hue? Why has purple been increasing in popularity? What will be the color of the new millennium? After answering more than a few of these calls, Leatrice Eiseman, director of the Pantone Color Institute, the company's research and information arm, decided that Pantone should stop giving out free advice.
In 2000, Pantone teamed up with the Amsterdam-based Metropolitan Publishing BV, which owns several textile-related magazines. They convened a panel of consultants from six countries — representing every Pantone-related market niche, from men's fashion to interior design to publishing — to produce the Pantone View Colour Planner. The $750 binder, released twice a year, features half a dozen or more palettes with names like Karma, Memory, and Harmonic. Leveraging the power of Pantone's position, every Colour Planner comes conveniently packaged with Pantone fabric swatches, the color language those designers will eventually need to communicate their choices to their textile and manufacturing partners.
"Being wrong with color can really hurt you," says Anne Cashill, vice president of merchandising at Liz Claiborne, which manufactures Kenneth Cole Sportswear, DKNY Jeans, and 16 other national brands. "We subscribe to the same color services as the Gap, Club Monaco, and Ralph Lauren. It's a good thing to be different, but it's not a good thing to be completely in left field."
That's precisely the kind of insecurity in the fashion industry that Pantone is exploiting. The company is burnishing its image as an authority on color just when authority is what big designers crave. That's because it's one thing to pick a risky shade when you're producing 1,000 pieces, and quite another when a million skirts hit the racks. At that scale, manufacturers need some guarantee that their bottom line won't be blown in an explosion of lime-green minis. At its core, that color confidence is what Pantone has always provided. First, the assurance that the blue you want is the blue you'll get. Now, a way to justify decisions to management teams that don't want to sign off on a line of purple clothing just because the design chief is "feeling purple."
The truth, perhaps unsurprising, is that color forecasting is hardly a science. Although consultants look to cultural touchstones — the economy, political climate, and social trends — there's a bit of Ouija board in how they formulate their predictions. Clients don't really care if the consultants devise their forecasts by rolling 20-sided dice in a marijuana haze for two weeks; all they care about is that someone can say with authority that tangerine will be big next fall. Then the dye makers can produce extra tangerine to meet the demand of fabric suppliers, who provide tens of thousands of bolts of tangerine fabric to manufacturers, who make tangerine skirts and tops and launch ad campaigns that create in consumers a yearning to wear tangerine.
All this is a far cry from Pantone's beginnings in the late '40s. Then, the struggling business made color cards for cosmetics companies that needed inks to match a proliferating array of nail polishes and lipsticks. Each match was an inefficient, smudgy custom job, and at the end of the day, thousands of ink pots littered the warehouse. To save the company from bankruptcy, a young employee named Lawrence Herbert devised a palette of 14 base inks that would yield 500 colors. If printers and ink companies agreed to use this system, Pantone would put them on a list of approved companies it was sending to designers in the growing ad industry.
The Pantone spec book hit designers' desks in 1964. It marked the first time that printers could faithfully reproduce colors, and happened just in time for the psychedelic explosion of the '60s. The system isn't perfect — different papers or ink densities will affect the final color — but its introduction marked a quantum leap.
Herbert, who became CEO in 1962 and is still company chair, likes to tell stories of the million-dollar brands he helped build. He came to the rescue of Eastern Airlines when its Caribbean blue planes were turning purple because of a pigment problem. He saved Kodak when the photo giant needed a close-as-possible replacement for the chrome yellow pigment used for its signature yellow packaging.
Herbert's children — all executives at the firm — are as savvy as their father when it comes to sensing market opportunities. The color forecasting initiative is one example. Another is the company's reach into the retail market. Launched in 2000, Pantone Universe is a line of upscale gear and office accessories, such as notebooks and tote bags. Each solidly colored product comes emblazoned with its Pantone code: a plastic pouch labeled 17-051 Wild Dove or a business card holder marked 18-0306 Gunmetal. Their sales pale next to the bread-and-butter business of color swatches and chips and software licenses, which provide most of the privately held company's revenue, but they reflect Pantone's growing presence. Pax Pantonia has become essential to the functioning of our material culture — even if the only mainstream evidence of it is a pencil case in 18-1662 Flame Scarlet.
