Pantone just announced its latest color of the year, a brownish red, dubbed "Marsala." What are your thoughts for its application in the floral industry? I've copy and pasted an article from the Wall Street Journal below.
Marsala is it. The color specialists at Pantone have chosen the color of 2015, a rich reddish brown they say will define consumers’ mood in the coming year.
Vintage-y, earthy and hinting at the dregs of a bottle of wine, the shade will pair well with the ’70s fashions hitting store shelves. The trendy tone is coming out in clothes, handbags, cosmetics and couch pillows.
“It has an organic and a sophisticated air,” says Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, Pantone’s color advisory group.
ENLARGE
Kendra Scott’s Harlow necklace in the color, which she calls Goldstone KENDRA SCOTT
If that brings to mind farm-to-table cuisine, bushy-but-coiffed beards and urban dwellers’ growing obsession with farm life, that is exactly the cultural phenomenon that Pantone—and the design world—are addressing here. “I was inspired by its kind of vintage spirit,” says accessories designer Koren Ray, founder of the Hobo brand of handbags and leather goods. She likes the color’s “folkloric” essence and is using it in bags and wallets.
Pantone forecasts the most popular colors ascending in décor, fashion and graphic design each December. The announcement has a cultlike following among designers and retailers looking for lightning rods for the coming year’s sales. Consumers gobbled up products in 2013’s Emerald and 2014’s Radiant Orchid, says Donna Garlough, style director of home-décor online retailer Joss & Main. “We keep an eye out for it,” she says of the color forecast.
BY THE NUMBERS: PANTONE COLOR OF THE YEAR
A breakdown of the Color of the Year program, from one to 13-1106
Pantone tips off some marketing partners, such as cosmetics retailer Sephora, about the color of the year, so that they can manufacture products in the shade. Sephora is planning a collection of Marsala cosmetics. The brand has worked with Pantone in the past: It is hard to forget Sephora’s Tangerine Tango eye shadow from 2012.
ENLARGE
Hobo Lauren Wallet HOBO
Pantone also reaches out to a few brands that it notices using the color, such as Hobo. Marsala is ideal for leather goods, and it dovetails with the surprising decline of interest in black, “which has become so generic,” Hobo’s Ms. Ray says. “Women are looking for bold neutrals to replace black.” After more than 20 years at the top of her best-sellers list, black has been knocked down by browns and grays, she says.
Marsala has already appeared in recent collections of designers who are considered influential. Marsala pants, coats and dresses appeared in the spring 2015 men’s and women’s collections of Dries Van Noten, Nicolas Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton, Raf Simons and Christopher Bailey at Burberry Prorsum.
Pillows, dishes and accent rugs in Marsala are also on the way. Kendra Scott is using it for her jewelry, though she’s calling the color Goldstone. “It makes me think of family,” Ms. Scott says. “As a culture right now, we are going back to things that are simple.”
ENLARGE
Ted Baker London woven silk tie NORDSTROM
Other companies have their own colors of the year, and they don’t necessarily agree, though earthy colors dominate 2015’s choices. Sherwin-Williams this fall named pinkish Coral Reef its paint color of the year—in apparent disagreement with Benjamin Moore, which went with a 19th-century shade of green called Guilford Green. Dutch paint company AkzoNobel chose a warm hue it calls Copper Orange.
But Pantone, a subsidiary of color-science specialist X-Rite Inc., dominates the attention due to its broad array of applications, providing professional color standards for many different design industries. To arrive at the color of the year, Pantone polls designers and creative types about what shades are on their minds.
Ms. Eiseman, an important player when it comes to picking Pantone’s color of the year, also chooses many of the names, which she says must evoke an emotion. Color names should be feel-good, she says. Sometimes there is confusion, as with 2011’s color of the year Honeysuckle, a name that conjured a soft yellow to some people. It was a pinkish shade.
ENLARGE
Pottery Barn plates POTTERY BARN
Others take more mischievous approaches to naming colors. British paint company Farrow & Ball is famous for its oddball titles, including the enticing Dead Salmon (pinkish) and Mole’s Breath (gray), as well as the mystifying Clunch (an off-white named for a chalky East Anglian building material).
Ms. Eiseman says she had a hand in naming Marsala in the 1990s: She had drunk the fortified wine on a trip to Sicily. She says she named Tangerine Tango while in Spain watching a dancer who wore an orange necklace. “It was the idea of an orange and a sexy dance you would do around it,” she says. And it is an easy guess where Ms. Eiseman was traveling when she named the particular color of turquoise that is Pantone’s Hawaiian Ocean.
Pantone started naming colors in the 1980s, when designers began to desire words to attach to the numerical codes. Several years ago, Pantone parsed its 2,100 named colors—a subset of the more than 30,000 shades it has defined by number—and discovered some of the older names didn’t seem smart enough. So it renamed them.
In the culling, Blue Green became Beach Glass. An olive brown called Drab became Cumin. And Deep Red Brown was rendered more delicious, Ms. Eiseman says, as Rum Raisin.
Retailers start ordering products in the color as soon as it is announced, hoping to have them in stock quickly. Without knowing the color of 2015, Joss & Main’s Ms. Garlough met with her team before Thanksgiving to discuss holding space on the website in January to spotlight it—whatever it was. “Having the color of the year has become a way of displaying authority,” she says.
Marsala is it. The color specialists at Pantone have chosen the color of 2015, a rich reddish brown they say will define consumers’ mood in the coming year.
Vintage-y, earthy and hinting at the dregs of a bottle of wine, the shade will pair well with the ’70s fashions hitting store shelves. The trendy tone is coming out in clothes, handbags, cosmetics and couch pillows.
“It has an organic and a sophisticated air,” says Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, Pantone’s color advisory group.
Kendra Scott’s Harlow necklace in the color, which she calls Goldstone KENDRA SCOTT
If that brings to mind farm-to-table cuisine, bushy-but-coiffed beards and urban dwellers’ growing obsession with farm life, that is exactly the cultural phenomenon that Pantone—and the design world—are addressing here. “I was inspired by its kind of vintage spirit,” says accessories designer Koren Ray, founder of the Hobo brand of handbags and leather goods. She likes the color’s “folkloric” essence and is using it in bags and wallets.
Pantone forecasts the most popular colors ascending in décor, fashion and graphic design each December. The announcement has a cultlike following among designers and retailers looking for lightning rods for the coming year’s sales. Consumers gobbled up products in 2013’s Emerald and 2014’s Radiant Orchid, says Donna Garlough, style director of home-décor online retailer Joss & Main. “We keep an eye out for it,” she says of the color forecast.
BY THE NUMBERS: PANTONE COLOR OF THE YEAR
A breakdown of the Color of the Year program, from one to 13-1106
Pantone tips off some marketing partners, such as cosmetics retailer Sephora, about the color of the year, so that they can manufacture products in the shade. Sephora is planning a collection of Marsala cosmetics. The brand has worked with Pantone in the past: It is hard to forget Sephora’s Tangerine Tango eye shadow from 2012.
Hobo Lauren Wallet HOBO
Pantone also reaches out to a few brands that it notices using the color, such as Hobo. Marsala is ideal for leather goods, and it dovetails with the surprising decline of interest in black, “which has become so generic,” Hobo’s Ms. Ray says. “Women are looking for bold neutrals to replace black.” After more than 20 years at the top of her best-sellers list, black has been knocked down by browns and grays, she says.
Marsala has already appeared in recent collections of designers who are considered influential. Marsala pants, coats and dresses appeared in the spring 2015 men’s and women’s collections of Dries Van Noten, Nicolas Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton, Raf Simons and Christopher Bailey at Burberry Prorsum.
Pillows, dishes and accent rugs in Marsala are also on the way. Kendra Scott is using it for her jewelry, though she’s calling the color Goldstone. “It makes me think of family,” Ms. Scott says. “As a culture right now, we are going back to things that are simple.”
Ted Baker London woven silk tie NORDSTROM
Other companies have their own colors of the year, and they don’t necessarily agree, though earthy colors dominate 2015’s choices. Sherwin-Williams this fall named pinkish Coral Reef its paint color of the year—in apparent disagreement with Benjamin Moore, which went with a 19th-century shade of green called Guilford Green. Dutch paint company AkzoNobel chose a warm hue it calls Copper Orange.
But Pantone, a subsidiary of color-science specialist X-Rite Inc., dominates the attention due to its broad array of applications, providing professional color standards for many different design industries. To arrive at the color of the year, Pantone polls designers and creative types about what shades are on their minds.
Ms. Eiseman, an important player when it comes to picking Pantone’s color of the year, also chooses many of the names, which she says must evoke an emotion. Color names should be feel-good, she says. Sometimes there is confusion, as with 2011’s color of the year Honeysuckle, a name that conjured a soft yellow to some people. It was a pinkish shade.
Pottery Barn plates POTTERY BARN
Others take more mischievous approaches to naming colors. British paint company Farrow & Ball is famous for its oddball titles, including the enticing Dead Salmon (pinkish) and Mole’s Breath (gray), as well as the mystifying Clunch (an off-white named for a chalky East Anglian building material).
Ms. Eiseman says she had a hand in naming Marsala in the 1990s: She had drunk the fortified wine on a trip to Sicily. She says she named Tangerine Tango while in Spain watching a dancer who wore an orange necklace. “It was the idea of an orange and a sexy dance you would do around it,” she says. And it is an easy guess where Ms. Eiseman was traveling when she named the particular color of turquoise that is Pantone’s Hawaiian Ocean.
Pantone started naming colors in the 1980s, when designers began to desire words to attach to the numerical codes. Several years ago, Pantone parsed its 2,100 named colors—a subset of the more than 30,000 shades it has defined by number—and discovered some of the older names didn’t seem smart enough. So it renamed them.
In the culling, Blue Green became Beach Glass. An olive brown called Drab became Cumin. And Deep Red Brown was rendered more delicious, Ms. Eiseman says, as Rum Raisin.
Retailers start ordering products in the color as soon as it is announced, hoping to have them in stock quickly. Without knowing the color of 2015, Joss & Main’s Ms. Garlough met with her team before Thanksgiving to discuss holding space on the website in January to spotlight it—whatever it was. “Having the color of the year has become a way of displaying authority,” she says.
