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by Julia Fein Azoulay, AATCC Review, April 2005, Page 40
"When you're walking down any aisle in Wal-Mart, the packaging and color is what draws the consumer to any given product," said attendee Stephanie Angelo of Milliken & Co. at a 2003 AATCC symposium at the New School University in New York. That's the bottom line. But color is a complex issue and color match prediction, reliability, and consistency is a high-stakes challenge.
Color, the Fickle Feature
Textile Color - Reflected or Scattered Light
Lighting and Color
Right First Time: Success or Bankruptcy
Consistency Becomes the Norm
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Color, the Fickle Feature
It's the color that grabs the customer— but color, ironically, is mutable: it changes, shifts, and fades or deepens depending on the light in the surrounding environment. Equally elusive is the notion of fashionable colors: they change often and quickly; in fact, popular color preferences are almost as fickle as consumers themselves.
Because consumer preferences change with the times, so too do manufacturer color palettes. "On one hand we're looking for the ultimate fun, and then on the other side we search for calm and reassurance. On one side we diet to keep fit, yet on the other hand we want to eat Ben & Jerry's ice cream or Krispy Kreme Doughnuts," says Tod Schulman of Pantone Inc. "Although these examples are about opposites, we see that polarized things can exist by way of compromise," notes Schulman. "In the forward of our Pantone View Color Planner product for Summer 2006 we talk about contradictions and how they are very much part of the human spirit. In terms of color we see the same thing arising. On one side we may have serious solid colors like brown, gaseous blacks, or mineral ore slates and copper but they now become redefined through the additions of catalysts like violet, yellow, turquoise, and green."
Constant changes in color fashion keep designers, dyers, manufacturers, marketers, and product display teams busier than many might know. At Target, for example, "items are positioned — either hanging or laid flat — based on color coordination," says Aaron Johnson. That's because consumers experience an emotional reaction to color and often decide to purchase because of that color. Product mix on the retail floor impacts that decision: red, yellow, and orange may radiate warmth, while blue, green, and purple may cool emotions down, for example — but a color's relationship to the colors it's hanging next to impacts customer perception of the relative warmth or coolness of that particular garment. It's often the undertone of any given shade that affects its "temperature," and these undertones can be amplified or repressed by lighting type and power.
Further complicating matters, a shop window may boast a lux range of 1,100 to 1,200, while a personal living room may plummet to a lux range of 55 to 65, and it is often in the latter setting that consumers' satisfaction with their purchases registers. Manufacturers and retailers alike, in other words, have to understand a great deal about color and the relationship between lighting and consumer perception of color to maximize sell through, avoid returns and chargebacks, and secure customer loyalty.
Perception of Color Varies with Lighting
"Lighting doesn't change the colors of objects, it is part of the colors consumers see when they look at objects," explains Richard Lawn of eWarna. "Objects don't have colors, they have color properties, and those don't change. If all the lights go out, there is no color, and if we all close our eyes, there is also no color. Yet the 'colored' objects around us haven't changed their properties at all."
With the caveat that "language is an important part of what manufacturers and retailers should understand when discussing color and lighting," Lawn adds that "color swatches do not 'flare' in a different light, the flaring happens in the observer's head ... Light is a part of the color of garments, not an external factor that changes the colors of garments."
Keith Hoover of Target Corp. elaborates. "Imagine the spectrum of the rainbow; when you pass a white light over the colors along every wavelength of that spectrum, the spectrometer measures how much light is reflected back at each point along the spectrum. When you plot those values on a graph, you get the reflectance curve—which becomes like the fingerprint of a color. That is the way you characterize a color in numbers. The way you characterize a light source in numbers is in terms of how much energy it emits at every wavelength across the spectrum, which is called the SPD (spectral power distribution).
Hoover explains, "An incandescent light bulb, for example, doesn't emit much light in the blues and greens but it emits a lot in yellows, oranges, and reds. If you apply the numbers from the light source to the reflectance curve, then that tells you how that color is going to look under those conditions. This explains why it's hard to see navy under an incandescent light—because it doesn't have much blue in it."
Revealing that Target considered two factors in determining what type of light to use on the retail floor (the super-size locations needed the cost efficiency of florescent lighting, but also wanted to create the psychologically-welcoming atmosphere created by typically residential incandescent lighting—and so opted for a yellowish tri-phosphor), Hoover concedes that "the million dollar question is what color light should be at retail. Tri-phosphors are like computer monitors: they mix the red light, green light, and blue light to get a white light—so instead of a having energy all across the spectrum as is the case with daylight, you basically have three spikes of energy across the spectrum; by changing the relative percentage of red, blue, and green, you affect the color of the light itself."
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Textile Color - Reflected or Scattered Light
"Textiles are materials that reflect or scatter light," explains Rolf Kuehni, chair ofAATCC Committee RA 36, Color Measurement. "The colors a color-normal person experiences when looking at colored textiles under different conditions of lighting and surround can vary. Color-normal observers disregard, to a smaller or larger extent, the effects of lights varying in their spectral power distribution on the perceived color. The spectral distributions of, say, daylight and tungsten light bulb lamp light vary very significantly, and as a result the lights arriving at the eye from one particular dyed textile from the two lights also vary significantly. Yet for many objects, particularly natural objects, the apparent color of the object is the same."
According to Kuehni, there are other objects where the apparent color in different lights changes as a result of changes in light source. The former objects are known as color constant, the latter as color inconstant. "When dye formulations are established they can be made in a fashion that results in color-constant appearance, or, to a smaller or larger extent, in the opposite," says Kuehni.
There are several constraints on achieving color constant formulations, according to Kuehni. "There may not be dyes with the necessary reflectance properties to achieve color-constant coloration available with the right fastness and application properties, or at a cost that keeps the manufacturer competitive," he says. "While it may be possible to obtain color-constant formulations for two or three light sources, there may be lamps in the field with spectral distributions for which a given color-constant formulation cannot be achieved."
Kuehni notes that there now is a formula available that allows calculation of a color inconstancy index. "However, its accuracy is limited," he cautions. Given that standardization is voluntary in a free society and that light sources in stores change and vary, Kuehni points out that the issue is complex. The spectral power distributions of fluorescent light sources, the most energy efficient, differ dramatically from those of daylight. An "engineering" solution, on the other hand ... "would involve limitation of light sources and establishing color constant samples up front."
Like Hoover, Kuehni believes the designer should be responsible for providing color-constant (according to retailer lighting) color samples to the dyer; in this case, he says, "the resulting standards would just need to be matched spectrally as closely as possible by the dyer (a task he is up to), and the result would be color constant to the extent the standard is."
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Lighting and Color
Optimally, in the case of apparel and textiles, says Hoover, "you design under the same conditions as will apply at retail. The designers 5 intent is to consider how that color will look in the store, so they recreate the lighting conditions and design accordingly. But it limits them — because you can't see the same bright blue under those conditions as you can under daylight."
Lawn explains that "because light is a part of color, changing the light always changes the perceived color of an object. The question is by how much the perceived color changes, and whether it bothers the consumer."
"In general, lighting that uses a hot filament (spot lights, normal light bulbs) gives out the most light at the red end of the spectrum. Lighting that relies on fairly low-temperature fluorescence (strip lighting) gives out the most light at the other end of the spectrum, with manufacturers trying to get the most energy in the greenish center of the spectrum that we are most sensitive to more apparent illumination for less money," says Lawn. "So items will often change perceived color most when moving from a 'hot 9 illuminant to a 'cool' one."
These two types of lighting often are used in a mixed fashion in stores. According to Lawn, retailers need to understand the effects that switching them can have on how a customer perceives an object. "All perceived colors change when lighting changes," he notes. "Some changes are more or less obvious than others, and problems generally arise when changes don't all go the same way or by the same amount."
Additionally, "the job of the designer, the manufacturer, and the retailer is to understand the lighting that will be part of the color that they are trying to sell to the consumer and to make sure their whole product development and manufacturing process takes account of the lighting components of the garment at sale time," says Lawn. "Lighting is as much a sales component of a garment on the retail floor as the fabric is."
Recognizing the fiscal implications of color matching, Target (which maintains both consistent lighting and spacing within all stores) requires that dyers submit their lab dips for approval — and insists that suppliers and vendors have color communication hardware and software — so that there are no prediction X-factors in a volume context that involves billions of units of production.
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Right First Time: Success or Bankruptcy
Indeed, color match prediction is so important, says Lawn, "because a difference of 10% in right first time (RFT) rates (the number of times a color comes out of a dyeing process the first time within color tolerance of the target color) means the difference between success and bankruptcy for a dye mill, and dye mills that use color match prediction correctly get better RFT rates than ones that don't." "Color is the only product attribute that end consumers find so important and can judge so acutely," Lawn adds. "Yet the production of textile color is one of the sloppiest and inherently variable industrial processes in existence—there are very few production processes left where getting the product wrong (i.e., WFT) 10% of the time may be considered a good performance. So when trying to hit a color target to a precision of one in a few million, using a machine 100 yards long that will run the same color through perhaps a whole day's ambient temperature cycle, a couple of sets of shift workers, valves that stick now and then, heat control that is on/off not continuously variable, and starting with variable dyes and fabric (that is, their properties vary by more in proportion than the tolerance allowed in the final color) the dyer needs any extra help available. And color match prediction is one of the best types of help there is."
Adding that basic color match prediction software assumes essentially that the color produced by a combination of dyes at specific percentages given specific fabrics and processes can be calculated, Lawn explains that the more sophisticated software attempts to "leam" from previous results and that learning versions of the software can be taught; if enough data is given to the software, the results can also be tailored. "This sort of software can 'anticipate' recipe changes from changed input variables," says Lawn. "The more data, the better the results. Or it could adjust data from one source to fit another operation for different environments."
Unfortunately, as in many other industry contexts, the accuracy of color match prediction depends upon how carefully the user inputs data and results: proper training and support, therefore, may be as important as the software itself. "The more sophisticated learning software versions cost more," notes Lawn, "yet I have seen many people pay the extra but never read back in any results data the software therefore can leam nothing and the extra money is wasted."
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Consistency Becomes the Norm
Ultimately, the perceived color of any given textile or product is a function of three factors: the illumination of that product, the qualities of the product itself, and the reflectance curve of the color associated with it. Increasingly, as technology allows for precise color communication and retailers can get assurances in both the lab dip and quality assurance stages, expectations will rise— but so will the opportunities for accuracy.
Color match prediction will become a non-issue. Color match guarantees will likely become a given. And color communication will improve production consistency. Manufacturers and vendors on the front line of that movement will discover greater customer satisfaction and loyalty as retailers find themselves better able to meet consumer expectations and consistency becomes the norm.
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