What is it about this American company that makes $250 million a year selling colors?

Introduction THECAPITAL Turning Color into Money

Introduction to THECAPITAL

Introduction

THECAPITAL

Turning colors into money

This article is 3,868 words long and takes about 5 5 minutes Source Positively Interpreted Bureau

This article is 3868 words long, about 5 5 minutes.

Source: Positive Solutions Bureau

The Wuling Hongguang MINI EV topped the 2024 minivan sales charts announced not long ago with more than 260,000 units sold.

Flexible, compact and affordable, the Wuling Hongguang MINI EV has become the people’s mobility scooter.

The color of the Wuling Hongguang MINI EV appearance is to attract countless female customers.

However, many people did not notice a detail In the lower left corner of the Wuling Hongguang MINI EV poster Inspired by PANTONE UNIVERSE.

This PANTONE is actually an American company, which we translate as Colorcom.

This is a magical company.

The main business is to sell colors, and it can earn one or two hundred million a year.

At the end of 2024, Colorado announced this year’s color of the year, Mocha Mousse, a color that looks a little bit like coffee or caramel, and a little bit like Meridian, a warm-toned style with a predominantly brown hue.

The color was also soon used by the French luxury watch brand TRILOBE on a watch with a price tag of 10,800 euros.

What is the power of ColorTone?

Coloring the world

The color of the year 2025, Mocha Mousse, corresponds to PANTONE 17 1230 TCX, which is also the representative color of the year released for the 26th year.

Since 2000, Chromatone Color Institute has been announcing a color at the end of each year as the Color of the Year, which is not a summary of the past year, but a prediction for the coming year.

According to the official statement, this year’s Mocha Mousse is an evocative, soft brown that transports our senses to the delights and tastes it inspires. The color is warm and rich, satisfying our vision of comfort.

In 2023 it is launching its color of the year, called Extraordinary Magenta Viva Magenta 18 1750, a vivid new red that encourages experimentation and uninhibited self-expression, an uplifting color that transcends borders and represents a style that is obvious and stands out.

So the question is, what makes Colorcom say that this year’s trend color is whatever it is?

Herbert, the founder of Chromatone, once said, God created the world in seven days, and I let Chromatone color the world on the eighth day.

Life is full of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, kindergarten children can say a lot of colors, after entering the industrialized society, because of the lack of uniform standards of expression has become a big problem.

The most intuitive feeling, for example, how red is red? How much difference is there between bright yellow and dark yellow? What is the closest color to the blue you know?

And when Party A proposes a colorful black, what kind of result do you really need to define it?

On mass-produced products, the biggest headache for all designers is the result of color differences.

The product is displayed in a cold and dry store in Moscow, but the packaging is printed in a factory in Zhejiang, China. Different light, temperature, humidity and aging of materials can distort the colors, and all of this has to be pre-programmed in advance on the designers’ computers, but the parameters of the design software and monitors may be different for the rendering of the colors.

In the context of globalization of trade, a large number of products have to be designed, produced, reproduced and sold, and if there is no uniform way to describe these colors, there will be no way to unify the shape of the goods, and even the global trade will be greatly affected.

Colorcom solves this problem.

It created the world-renowned standard language for color communication, and was the first and most authoritative company to define color. From designers to manufacturers to customers, from graphic design to printing and publishing, from textiles to metal and plastic surfaces, all follow its PANTONE Color standard, and all parties communicate seamlessly.

Color is nature’s, originally priceless, the development of the color number itself is not worth money, but the color through the first step, and continue to improve, so that people around the world believe in its standards, so there is a set of operating systems, countless ecological partners in the growth.

This is the reason for the existence of Colorcom.

Game Maker

In the 1950s, two brothers, Mervin and Jesse Levine, founded the advertising and printing company M J Levine in New Jersey, USA.

In 1956, they recruited Lawrence Herbert, a young man who had just graduated from Hofstra University, to work part-time for the company. At the time, they couldn’t have predicted that this young man would later turn the tables and become the founder of Colorado.

In the 1950s, there was no uniformity in the American color printing industry, and M J Levine’s printers used a basic stock of about 60 different pigments and an inefficient trial-and-error method of mixing ink colors.

The young Herbert couldn’t stand to watch, and with his proficient knowledge of chemistry, he was able to mix a variety of color inks by reducing the pigment inventory to only 12 basic palettes.

This event intrigued him so much that it even caused him to abandon the idea of pursuing a medical degree.

By 1962, Herbert was in charge of half of the printing business, while the company’s original partners, though focused on promoting commercial displays, kept losing money and soon ran up a $50,000 debt.

Eventually, Herbert bought the company’s assets from them for $50,000, and from then on the name was changed to Pantone From the name, you can see the ambition of his pan stands for comprehensive All, and tone is the tone.

Since then, Herbert entered the open mode, leading the development of Pantone to become an international authority on color and color systems.

In 1963, Pantone launched the first Pantone Matching System Printer Edition, or PMS for short, which was the core of the company’s credibility and global reach.

The 12 basic pigments were further reduced to 10, making color generation much simpler.

He wrote to 21 major ink manufacturers at the time, presenting his technology and products and offering them the possibility of becoming manufacturers of the 10 basic inks, which would be licensed by Colorcom.

Unexpectedly, 20 of them signed up and paid royalties to Colorcom in less than two weeks.

The pain point was solved, like a windowpane being poked through.

This insignificant business has completely changed the bottom line of the color printing industry.

During the remainder of the 1960s, PMS spread throughout the design and printing industries, becoming the industry standard, and Herbert struck while the iron was hot with the Pantone Color Specifier for the designer community in 1964, followed the next year by the first artist’s material guide to PMS, with different versions of the color product being developed one after the other.

It’s not hard to understand their core product, the Pantone Color System, PCS provides a global language of color to assist brands and manufacturers in making critical color decisions at every stage of the workflow.

In order to meet the needs of different fields, PCS includes two kinds of color systems, i.e. PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM (PMS) and PANTONE FASHION HOME INTERIORS SYSTEM (FHI), which have been mentioned before.

In the printing industry, this system is mainly based on the Pantone Guides color cards, which are fan-shaped cards consisting of a large number of small cardboard or plastic sheets of about 6×2 inches or 15×5 centimeters with a series of relevant information printed on one side.

Each spot color on the swatch has a unique numerical number and a letter suffix indicating the material to which it applies.

For example, one of the trend colors released by the Colorcom Color Institute for the apparel industry is bran, with the color number PANTONE 17 1336 TCX, where the color number is the unique 17 1336 and TCX represents the cotton version of the color card in the textile field.

After decades of accumulation, there are 3,026 spot colors with exclusive color numbers in the PMS that can be blended into a single color, 6,732 overprinted colors that can be created with different ratios of inks, and 3,049 colors in the FHI for home interiors system.

It’s a seemingly simple thing to do, and because Colorcom does it, the printing and textile industry has been using it as a basis for standards for decades.

When Steve Jobs was designing the Apple, he approached Colorcom, and Colorcom came up with 2,000 beige colors for beige, but Jobs didn’t like any of them, and that’s a story for another time.

In any case, Herbert, who led Colorcom, kept updating his color cards and color books, always maintaining a professional leadership position, and by the 1970s, he had already sold 100,000 copies of color materials.

In 1974, Colorcom produced the first computer-specific ink color matching system and data system, and a new era of digital color printing thus began.

Between 1988 and 1990, Colorado had licensing agreements with most of the world’s major graphics and design software manufacturers, and the Colorado standard appeared in computers for the Macintosh and IBM PC.

Sole Connector

In November 2022, a pop-up message left designers around the world with mixed feelings inside.

Adobe would begin charging $15 per month per account for the color pass colors in its Photoshop InDesign and Illustrator Creative Cloud apps, or the color pass colors in all old PSDs and other files would go black.

Originally, Color Pass colors were packaged in Adobe software, and according to Adobe Senior Vice President Ashley Still, Color Pass has modified its business model so that all users must purchase a license through Pantone Connect and install the plug-in using Adobe Exchange to be able to use the full Color Pass colors.

On the other hand, ColorTone claims that Adobe’s internal color library has not been maintained for a long time, resulting in inaccurate ColorTone colors.

This has caused a fierce backlash from designers around the world. According to incomplete statistics, the Pantone color card is used by about 10 million designers, printers and related practitioners every day, a large number of whom are computer users.

But even if some users are not satisfied, there is nothing they can do, which is the power of the underlying standard.

American social platform Reddit, a user said I work in a print store, color pass color is still the standard For full-color CMYK printers, it may not be the key, but for two-color printers is necessary!

There are also freelance designers that prioritize the color pass option in their branding and design service packages as a way of conveying a sense of professionalism to their clients, and while the client feels good about it, the $15 monthly fee is offset in the service quote.

Yes, they can’t live without Color Pass.

As for the big companies, whether it’s Coca-Cola’s red, Starbucks’ green, or Hermes’ orange, every major headline brand is well aware of the emotional meaning that color conveys to the consumer, and the proprietary brand colors locked down through Color Pass ultimately become part of the brand’s equity.

More than 400 brands have licensed with Colorcom to use the PMS system to make sure that the colors of the brand identity system will not be deviated in different media around the world.

In the 1960s, Kodak Kodak found that its film packaging in different manufacturers after the printing out of the presentation of different shades of yellow, customers see the darker yellow packaging in the film is not fresh, Kodak’s sales were actually affected by this.

In the end, this matter was resolved with the help of Colorcom.

Porsche and Colourcom cooperated to launch Porsche Turbo Black Turbonite, an exclusive color designed for all Porsche Turbo models.

How many girls love the jewelry brand Tiffany Tiffany, not to forget its exclusive Tiffany Blue.

In 2001, Tiffany and Colorcom collaborated to customize this color as Pantone 1837, since then this brand exclusive color not only will not appear in the Pantone Color Guide color card, and unless authorized by Tiffany, no printer can print Pantone 1837 for anyone.

In 2021, Xiaomi launched the first 4K professional monitor 27-inch model at the time, because of the authoritative certification by Pantone Color Guide, after the factory calibrated one by one, to meet the most professional and stringent requirements, became one of the few high-performance products, the price of 3499 yuan, more expensive than the previous 34-inch 144Hz high refresh surface.

As a result, about 15 of Colorcom’s annual profits come from color cooperation with large corporations.

The essence of Colorcom’s color code is like creating a language that allows people to communicate accurately about the matter of color.

By the same token, Colorcom’s annual color is partly a forecast and partly an effort to shape consensus.

It also gives a very comprehensive instruction manual for the annual color on its official website, including what scenarios it can be used in, how to match it, and so on.

Of course, you’ll need to pay a large sum of money to get further color services.

To borrow a comment from Fast Company, the release of the Color of the Year has been Colorcom’s most important marketing tool. Through a story, it makes you identify with the color.

In other words, it’s created new connections between factories and designers, artists and tradesmen, so that they can collaborate more accurately on the matter of color.

So there’s this sound that Colorcom has a monopoly on color!

It can’t be helped, who made connection is power and consensus is business opportunity.

According to LeadlQ, in 2024, Colorcom’s revenue was $35 million, reaching its peak in recent years.

In earlier years, we used to lament the difficulty of our manufacturing industry, shirts for airplanes .

Now look again, we are catching up not only with the power of science and technology The scale of the industry, sometimes seize the first-mover advantage, the development of industry standards, even if you can build a consensus in a very small area, there is a chance to really stand in the upper reaches of the industry chain.

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Here, you can get rich equity investment industry information Hot reports Frontier industry reports Key topics research Latest industry news. Linking capital, connecting markets, linking resources, and jointly building a new platform for venture capital exchanges and a win-win circle of friends.

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