A Colorful Bit of History...Pantone Colors: Essay for Made to Measure Magazine

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For the last 40+ years, the internationally recognized Pantone Matching System (PMS) is what has laid out choices of color for all visual aspects of our world: Cars and fabrics, cosmetics and hair care, house paints and carpeting, china and crockery, plastics and appliances, crayons and computer design graphics, and more.  Colorwise, today’s finished products are determined by Pantone, Inc., and interestingly, not the other way around.  Home Depot orange, UPS brown, Tiffany blue, Barbie pink: It is the work of genius.

There are shades of light and dark by adding black and white; tints of colors such as azure, navy, royal, or teal blues; and the various hues such as basic red, blue, yellow, orange, brown, and so forth.  There are metallics, shineys, and flats or bisques—no different than lame’s, satins, and cottons or woolens. 

Every one of the hundreds of Pantone colors is different, and yet similarities abound.  Colors can appear with an entirely different presentation on fabric than on a paper calling card or the sign painted on a company truck.   Sometimes, it’s very difficult to convince a customer that the color he sees in a magazine may be closely duplicated but not exactly, when attempting to transfer ink to cloth, or a printed logo to embroidery thread.  Substances grab dyes differently.  PMS colors help us as manufacturers and sellers of uniforms to convince our shoppers that there is an official bottom line for color.

Based in Carlstadt, New Jersey, Pantone is run by Lawrence Herbert and his daughter, Lisa.   Herbert, whose great love is color, began working for the printing company in 1956, hoping to become a physician one day, while printing color cards for cosmetic companies in the meantime.   However, with his backgrounds in chemistry and biology, he began to perfect various recipes for colors with scientific precision, and eventually expanded his knowledge to deal with the full spectrum.  Ultimately, he bought the printing operations portion of the company, which he finally incorporated into his own firm in 1963. 

Until that time, every printer had his own palette of colors, but none was synchronized with another; even within the same printing house, the colors were often skewed or off-tone from one run to the next.  What Herbert did was profound: He standardized color.  He gave every available shade, tint, and hue a different number and recipe (and sometimes a name) that cannot be varied.  He went to 21 printing companies with his recipes, hoping to convince them that this kind of color regulation would be an asset.  They went for it, and the rest, as they say, is “his-story.”  

Today, there are approximately 1,800 different blends from which one can choose.  When a company wants a particular shade that isn’t a part of the Pantone system, then Pantone will invent it.  If it is a patented, corporate color, then only that particular company has access to it.  If it is less protected, then there is public access.

New colors are constantly being created.  In fact, many industries circle the Pantone crystal ball as early as 18 months in advance in order to find out what the color wizards are up to.  In so doing, there is a cooperative and coordinate multi-industry effort to utilize the latest Pantone offerings: Will it be a brown fall, or a pink spring, a black and red winter, a marigold summer?  If you think fashion or automobile manufacturers know, think again.  It is Pantone.  The environmentalists did not come up with kiwi and lime green for last season’s spring shirts.  Nope.  It was Pantone.

When you open your latest catalogues, or design your new garments for the season, you are specking out the available PMS colors that were developed months in advance.  If you show the current items from your favorite vendor, whether it be seasonal color changes, or newly mixed shades, it’s all from the Pantone color spectrum.   Should you call a thread manufacturer or fabric converter, an embroiderer or screen printer, a button or zipper distributor, you are utilizing Pantone.

To the extent that the uniform industry is more conservative than some, one might think that fewer colors would be used.  On the other hand, because uniforms now include such an enormous array of choices, this is less and less the case.  What has to be called “gigglebox fun,” is that Pantone also delights in pairing colors, thereby putting particular color combinations in the spotlight as readily as it does single tints and shades: Navy and pink; black and khaki; grey and red—such mixes are whole units unto themselves.

Sets of the PMS color cards—not unlike the early cosmetic cards that Mr. Herbert first created—are not only available as basic all-purpose chips, but there are card sets used solely for the textile industry, as well.  The only problem with selling a customer off of these cards is that there is usually a 3,000-5,000 yard minimum to have fabric custom dyed.  Going offshore for a lower minimum, even without customs and freight, is not a lot less.

The next time your customer comes in with a bottle of suntan lotion and tells you that he wants you to match the lettering on the side of the bottle to a razzle dazzle fabric with a keen sheen, as a must for his singing group’s new uniform shirts, think PMS.  Use it with him, and then forward the color number to your supplier, who also should have the cards.  Hopefully, this will save you hours and hours of researching and postage for sample swatches, and earn you a handsome account at the same time.