Decorative Coatings - The colour they have or the colour you want?

There was a time when we all rushed how to watch a particular TV show on a particular station at a specified time. Time was suspended, we ate cold food and restaurants shut for the evening. To day its possible to watch what you want, when you want on whatever device you want.

So why is it still so hard to decorate your house with the exact colour you want, rather than the "Trend Colour" your favourite paint supplier wants to supply you?

Going back to Grandads day, when paint was protective rather than decorative, only a few colours were available. "British Museum Green", "Swedish Yellow" etc. The focus was on chemistry rather than colour.

As the world of colour evolved, colour TV, Colour Newspapers and well, everything colour, consumers started demanding more from their paint suppliers.

Typically, tastes may differ regionally, and even in one country like South Africa, coastal tastes may differ to inland preferences, so manufacturers were faced with a challenge.

Do you pre-manufacture thousands of colours in small volumes and store these around the country "Just in case", or a better idea, allow local outlets like Hardware Stores formulate the colour on demand from the consumer.

This lead to manufacturers shipping un-coloured '"Paint" to a Point of Sale" (POS) as well as smaller volumes of colour concentrate. As the concentrates were standardised, the POS also received a set of cardboard "Colour cards" or a current palette range, as well as a related fixed formulation to repeat the colour on the card.

This process has served us well for the past 30 years or so, but it has its limitations. Say a concentrate varies from batch to batch, what happens to the formula? Say you want a colour not catered for in the many cards. Say you don't have half a morning to sift through "Fifty shades of Gray" to find the correct colour. Say you and your interior decorator take forever to visualise the finished effect?

Like my Toyota Corolla, you tend to hand on to things that work well. Eventually however, new technology will eventually disrupt the "Status Quo" and this is now the case.

Enter the Portable Spectrophotometer.

Expanding on the existing process, a portable instrument is now reliable enough, and affordable enough to measure your colour, either at the POS outlet, or even in your home. (Yes you can match the exact colour to the wall just trashed by the furniture movers!).

• The procedure is: Measure your colour.
• Feed the data to your paint suppliers Central Data Base
• Create a formulation ON THE FLY
• Dispense the formulation to the quantity required
• pay the man and go home and paint.

Pie in the sky? On the 27th of March we demonstrated this process to one of the largest local manufacturers on THEIR equipment.

Ask us for more details here.