Predicting the future was once the domain of palm readers, tea leaf enthusiasts, and crystal ball aficionados.
However, those days have, for the most part, disappeared, relics of an age with much less access to science and reliable data. And while the 21st century's version of the crystal ball is neither an exact science nor completely free of mystery, for merchandisers and designers itching to know the back-to-school season's hottest colors, that crystal ball is Pantone®.
Pantone and The Future of Color
Pantone is the world-recognized authority on color, color systems and color communication for industries as diverse as architecture, fashion, manufacturing and design. Because color
influences the mind and the body, Pantone's prediction of a season's hottest colors has the potential to affect sales, market and the national mood.
From design to product manufacturing to the retailer who sells it to the customer, knowing—and not knowing—the future of color can directly impact your bottom line.
For online retailers, however, knowing what colors are bound to be hot for the upcoming season is only half the battle. Proper, timely and efficient color management, whether due to changes in inventory levels, trends, season or popularity, must also be executed, or success will still elude you.
The Jansport® Lesson
When backpack wunderkind Jansport finally opened its online store midway through 2013, the challenges of managing an online store with such vast product catalogs was difficult, to say the least.
The need to synthesize massive amounts of product-related data while managing multiple programs, spreadsheets, inventory numbers, social media activity, updates, product sequencing and color codes kept the small ecommerce team hamstrung—especially when it came to color-related decisions.
Essentially, the Jansport team lacked the ability to act on color-related information, because they were working with words and code, not visuals. As their ecommerce director explained it, "We often found ourselves wondering what the difference was between ‘fluorescent pink’ and ‘pink pansy,’ and how those varied from ‘pink tulip.’
“Without a visual aid, it’s difficult. And when you have more units of one pink over another, and people are rating one more highly—you need to take all of that into consideration when making merchandising decisions.”
The Visual Color Management Solution
To solve these problems, Jansport turned to Smart Merchandiser's visual catalog management solution and achieved complete product visualization within a single interface, including attributes, size, material and, of course, color.
Now, they're more efficient and more productive, and whenever the horns of Pantone's impending color changes blow through their offices—or the Ice Bucket Challenge suddenly becomes associated with a particular shade of blue—they can take that knowledge and implement it across their entire catalog quickly and efficiently with drag-and-drop functionality that's as easy to change tomorrow as it was today.
Manage the future of color as easily as Pantone predicts it this back-to-school season with an easy-to-use and easy-to-see visual catalog management tool.
See what Smart Merchandiser can do to help you better manage color this back-to-school season—download The Digital Merchandiser’s Guide to Maximizing Margins with Visualized Data eBook today to learn more!
