With Coloro’s Newest Launch, PVH Designers Save a ‘Boatload of Time’
Traditionally, translating color from the design stage to physical materials has been a series of trials and errors. Creative teams share their color vision with their suppliers, who then try to recreate it on yarns and fabrics with dye.
Not every color is achievable on every material, but this is typically not discovered until manufacturers start doing lab dips, or swatches. If an initial test is a failure, multiple rounds of lab dips ensue, eating up resources and time, until they decide it is impossible to match. “A designer is kind of back at square one, they’ve got a color hole to fill, they can’t get the color they wanted to fit in with their collection,” Sansan Chen, managing director at WGSN‘s color management system Coloro, told Sourcing Journal.
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What comes next are compromises with the best possible color alternatives. Chen noted that these might not be as vibrant or as colorfast as the brand wanted. “These products tend to be marked down over time, or they can be discarded at some point down the road,” she said. “It just becomes the unwanted, unloved products that are on the shelves.”
Coloro is aiming to simplify the color development process through the launch of its Coloro Feasibility Intelligence tool. This platform allows designers to enter a color code and see whether it will be feasible on different fabric types—including polyester, cotton, nylon and wool. “Our vision for this solution was to put the knowledge in the hands of the people who are making these color decisions at a time when it can really [make an] impact,” said Chen. “We thought that there was a real opportunity to bring that transparency right up front.”
CFI was a project five years in the making. Coloro worked with partners to build a database for CFI by dyeing more than 200,000 samples using 100 different commercial dyes in 16 concentrations and performing over 120,000 tests, including testing methods and standards such as ISO, AATCC and GB. The user selects the color they are after, their tolerances, fabric composition, testing standards such as ISO and any other parameters such as banning heavy metals, and the algorithm calculates whether it will be feasible and generates a report showing a green, yellow or red score. Should a color be deemed difficult, CFI will present the closest matches that are feasible.
“We designed it to be super simple so that anybody, even if they don’t have technical knowledge or a very technical color team, can still use it and still benefit,” said Chen.
Coloro’s system uses hue, lightness and chroma to define colors, giving each a seven-digit code. The system features around 4,500 existing codes to choose from, but the methodology could be used to identify up to 1.6 million colors. If a designer creates a custom color, Coloro can use algorithms to determine feasibility on different materials.
A pro version of CFI will soon launch a sustainability module that will include alternative dyeing methods, allowing companies to see the closest colors achievable with these processes. One of these is dope dyeing, in which man-made fibers are dyed in the liquid stage before being spun. The other is a soaping-free process for reactive dyeing cotton. Companies can also request only colors that are possible with Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals (ZDHC) certification.
Currently, CFI is solely focused on textiles, but Coloro is planning to expand it to other materials like plastic.
PVH is among the companies that have begun working with Coloro Feasibility Intelligence. Ryan Stanley, senior director, color at PVH, explained the importance of color feasibility. “Without visibility to achievability based on feasibility of color on materials to a brand’s requirements, design could waste a boatload of time thinking that they can get something that they can never get,” he told Sourcing Journal.
Color feasibility becomes especially important when the hue must be exact. “If you have…core hero colors that are representative of the brand, you want to make sure that you can achieve those colors to your requirements to meet a certain level of quality globally,” said Stanley.
By proactively beginning with feasibility, this allows for parameters to be discussed upfront with mills to see if they have the right dyes and chemicals to achieve a particular color, Stanley said. For instance, a brand might need to avoid certain substances. Certain products will need to be more lightfast, while others will need to be able to withstand numerous wash cycles without losing color.
Providing designers with color achievability information can change how they think about color, reducing wasted energy on designs that can’t be produced or that are later altered. “Feasibility ensures that design’s vision will flow through execution and be delivered to the consumer,” Stanley said. “The consumer then can say if they like it or not with their pocketbook, which will feed into merchant sales and trending information, which will flow back into design the following season across different trending services.”
Prior to joining brand-side teams, Stanley worked at a dye and chemical company. By leveraging his technical background and working with dyestuff companies to determine feasibility, combined with the use of digital color management tools, PVH had already improved the portion of colors that are right the first time to 80 percent. Adding CFI has raised this to 94 percent, and the goal is to get to 100 percent. Typically, the colors that aren’t right initially are approved within a couple rounds. He noted that since most colorists don’t come from the production world, CFI can help “fill that gap” in knowledge.
With access to feasibility information for specific dyes and auxiliaries, if a mill can confirm a color match digitally, Stanley noted the potential to entirely skip the lab dip process or physical color sampling. “In a perfect world, I don’t want to do any lab dips,” he said, pointing to the cost, time and resources involved.
Feasibility can also streamline processes in color development, which Stanley sees creating opportunities to tackle a “higher class of problems,” including experimentation. “I can leverage this feasibility information to create colors that have never been created before, to combine dyes and chemicals in a way that has never been done before and create new colors to design that I know are achievable on our materials to our requirements with mills and vendors,” he said.
