January 10, 2002

Seeing the Future in All Its Hues

By WILLIAM L. HAMILTON

ISA HERBERT was winter white, and that wasn't good.

"I mean, I just got back from Miami, but there was absolutely no sun there," said Ms. Herbert, the executive vice president of Pantone Inc. in Carlstadt, N.J., which develops, standardizes and forecasts colors for clients in the clothing, beauty, home furnishings and product-design industries.

With $2 billion a year in sales and licensing fees, Pantone is globally recognized for its 1,757-color palette (including 27 whites, excluding Ms. Herbert) and acknowledged as having the broadest reach worldwide, in a field of more than a dozen color forecasters.

I.B.M.'s "big blue" is Pantone Blue plus Pantone Violet. Barbie Pink is also a Pantone custom color, trademarked for use in more than 100 categories, including bubble bath and breakfast cereal. Tiffany's is working with Pantone to standardize its signature robin's-egg hue, then secure it by trademark.

Ms. Herbert, dressed in a camel-color sweater (camel's yellow undertones convey warmth and relaxation, she said) and sitting in a rose-beige conference room that was like being inside a fresh suntan, looked great. "I'd call it a bisque, or a nude," she said. "If you go into bridal salons, the rooms for the brides are done in this kind of color. Everyone looks great."

Popular color isn't just "in the wind" each season. It's generated by high-wind machines like Pantone, whose more than 250,000 client companies subscribe to its palette and custom services, including Nike, Shiseido, Apple, DKNY and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Companies choose to accept or ignore the forecasting advice; then they decide whether to admit or deny that they have even looked at it.

Pantone's color forecast for 2002 was revealed publicly last month. Its seven suggested palettes include "Aqueous" and "Allusion" — 20 atmospheric colors meant to intimate softness and calm. (They are largely pastel.) They would be instantly familiar to Pottery Barn customers. In the stores and the January catalog, titled "Relaxed Style — Create Your Own Sanctuary," new pillows, bedding and paint finishes are nearly identical pastel tones that Pottery Barn, a Pantone client, has given names like Cloud and Sky.

At the housewares show next weekend in Chicago, retailers will see new KitchenAid mixers in Pistachio and Lavender that will complement Pottery Barn's colors nicely in the kitchen. Whirlpool, the parent company, is a Pantone client, too.

Crate & Barrel's windows on Madison Avenue are also displaying cutting boards and mixing bowls in pastels this month. Unlike Pottery Barn and KitchenAid, Crate & Barrel denied using the Pantone forecast in creating its new colors, though a company spokesman said it also looks at it.

Pottery Barn passed on "Rio" and "Sicily," deeper, darker palettes that may be more appropriate to categories other than home furnishings, which is in part why Pantone forecasts seven different palettes.

Pantone's Matching System, an exact dye-ratio index invented in 1963 by Lawrence Herbert, Ms. Herbert's father, has been called the Oxford English Dictionary of the language of color. In 1982, Pantone, increasingly aware of the commercial value of its knowledge about the composition of color and its influence on consumers, founded the Color Institute — a corridor of offices and laboratories built beneath the shed roof of the New Jersey plant where Pantone prints and ships its color cards. The Color Institute publishes the Pantone View Color Planner, its projection of palettes, twice a year.

Pantone executives meet in London with an invited panel of six European color consultants and industry representatives to discuss sales performance and trends in their respective businesses, from makeup to cars, and public mood. The home furnishings forecast is developed separately later at Pantone.

What the participants bring to the table in London is a witches' brew of educated guesses, research and reports, large generalizations and safe bets. Rising Hispanic population in the United States? Tex-Mex food? Ricky Martin? Do reds. The projection for 2001 included "Fiesta," a palette of rich reds that did well in slipcovers for Pottery Barn.

Is there concern about the state of the oceans? Do blue. "Aqueous," a response to that, is now arriving in stores.

Blue is the favorite color of some 35 percent of the American public, said Leatrice Eiseman, a psychologist and the director of Pantone's Color Institute, who leads the London meetings. "You know this palette is going to be pleasing to a large part of the population," she said. Ms. Eiseman also reads Variety to know what kinds of movies are in production two years out.

Corporate clients who subscribe to Pantone's consultation services for fees running to the tens of thousands of dollars a year are investing in the belief that they are staying ahead of the game, which is consumers' taste. Pantone's companies have just received their forecasts for the spring and summer of 2003.

The panel met in London in November to determine the palettes for winter and fall of 2003. They will be the first projections to anticipate the lasting consumer reaction to events of Sept. 11.

"What we had started to see as the economy faltered, and what came into focus after September, was the whole idea of heritage and tradition," Ms. Eiseman said. "People feeling connected to each other, in a communal sense. People doing things in groups — playing games together, coming together for food."

How does this type of socioeconomics translate into color? "A graying-down of the color families," Ms. Eiseman explained. "More natural colors, and heritage colors — colonial blues, deeper teals, burgundy reds, earth brown."

The panel has proposed a palette of (hopefully enduring) early American colors called "Emblematic." The accents will be as bright and crisp as salutes. "In times of stress, people go to the colors of their flag," Ms. Eiseman said. "And there are product areas, like toys and plastics, where there is a need for brightness."

For skeptics who might think that projecting color trends is hoodoo, not hard fact, Pantone's headliner client list virtually guarantees that the universe of color will become, on schedule, a universe of products. Fashion — and its need to replace itself to keep sales strong — is forever.

"Because we're color leaders in small appliances, we get in and out of color, even on a short-term basis," said Brian Maynard, director of marketing at KitchenAid, which has worked with Pantone on product color since 1986. "Using a forecast helps you narrow down the choices, so you know where not to go." KitchenAid introduces three new colors each year at trade shows but does not produce them unless there is acceptance among visiting retailers.

Nike's global merchandising director for footwear, Todd Blumenthal, said of the Pantone forecast, "You can't afford not look at it."

Pantone makes trend presentations to Nike at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., and has developed custom colors for the company. But Mr. Blumenthal subscribes to 15 color-trend services, including Pantone.

"A large brand like Nike, you have to look and talk to everyone," he said. "Pantone definitely inspires us, but it's not how we develop our colors."

Subscribing to a color-trend service can be either market savvy or suicide. "The danger is to take them too literally," said Celia Tejada, vice president for product development at Pottery Barn. Her company, which is based in San Francisco, took inspiration from the Pantone 2002 forecast, but customized the color choices with a local vendor to establish a point of departure from competitors.

Unforeseeable events like Sept. 11 are the other danger, Ms. Tejada said. "We happened to be on the good side of the coin in this event," she said. Pottery Barn developed its soft, light palette for 2002 in 2000. "It made the color mood even more attractive — the feeling of being embraced by a warm home full of romance."

Claire Armstrong, a retail analyst at Banc of America Securities in San Francisco, said realistic thinking about the merchandise, not color, is the key to customer approval. "Pottery Barn will succeed by staying mainstream and conservative, whether it's pastel or not," she said. "People want things they can keep in their homes year after year. It's not the color that's at issue."

In the laboratories at the Color Institute on Friday, Ms. Herbert, extending a pink nail, defended the value of divining color while conceding the drawbacks, including the tendency of some corporate customers to never give credit where credit is due.

"The clients, they don't like to admit it," she said, speaking of the use of Pantone's forecast palettes. "We have a client in France — they won't even let us send a packing slip with the swatches, they're so afraid that someone's going to get that piece of paper that has the colors on it."

Next to her, a vast collection of bottles with clear dyes, patched by wire and pipette to a machine with a glass chamber and a control panel that looked like salon equipment for Frankenstein's bride, waited to make a vial of color. Is color forecasting a boon or a bust for consumers, who walk into a store and see not freedom of choice, but the palettes of a year-old prediction, or purchases that coordinate magically with everything else?

To Pantone, a $2 billion business now making licensing arrangements for its own proprietary line of home and contract furnishings, the answer is black and white.

"Clothing, carpet, paint," said Ms. Eiseman, the Color Institute director. "These palettes are a guideline for consumers. Without them, they're going to be too confused to buy."