Holiday Color Trends 2018

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Hey there product launchers. Welcome to Holiday in Summer and we're going to talk the whole week about holiday colors, seasonal strategies. And when we're talking holiday, I know we're close as we're recording this to Father's Day. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about fourth quarter holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, that whole holiday season, the whole gift giving season if you want to look at it that way. And so that's what we're really talking about when we talk about holidays at retail. Because you want to maximize every single dime you can get in that fourth quarter because it's the best time of year. It truly is the most wonderful time of year at retail. And so if you're in your planning mode, we want to really give you tools to be thinking about. What does that mean for holiday? And I'm starting it with color. That's today's topic. My favorite topic is to talk about color and I'm starting with color because there is a concerted color trend that goes on every holiday season. Silvers are in and there's silver decorations everywhere. They're splashed around magazines. The store displays reflect that. Or hot pink accents are in this year. That was a couple years ago anyway. But hot pink accents. And so when you get hot pink accents you start seeing it everywhere. And so I like to call color forecasting. I hate to call it science and math, but it's the science and math about choosing colors for the next season. It's actually what I'm going to call a self fulfilling prophecy. In other words, forecasters like color Marketing group and color trends and there's a whole color council, there's a whole ton of them around and when they choose colors they tend to happen. So that is exactly what we're talking about here, is that it sort of happens because they said it was gonna happen because there's a whole lot of people out there, you guys included, I know you were there, that are worried about picking colors. Part of you wanna pick black. There's already a podcast and a blog post and a video cast and we did an office hours about this, about the 8020 color rule. So we have that Going on with the fact that there is that want to choose the thing that's in the 20% only. But the time that that defies is when you make a seasonal product. When you make a product that's specifically meant to be bought in the holiday season, whether it's a decor item, it's specifically an ornament for a tree, anything like that, that is something that you must get the color right because everything else is going to be in there. And if your color is like often odd and it doesn't resonate with the person. So I might really like chartreuse green. It's my favorite color. And yet the color this year is a deep forest green. So buying chartreuse ornaments and buying chartreuse things may just not actually work and it won't sell as well. So that's some of the things that I've learned over time about color. Today I have for you my color trend report for holiday 2018. This is a coup, guys, because I charge about five, $6,000 just to talk about color. I usually charge $10,000 for just the holiday forecast. And I'm giving it to you Now. Keep in mind that if you were my client, I would have given this to you last October. So you're a little late in it, but it's not too late if you're placing your last minute orders in July, which is why I'm hosting this week. Because this is the last chance for those of you have an existing product and maybe you're going to make it a new color. You're going to place your final orders, you're going to be starting thinking about scaling up your order inventory levels and making your purchase order decisions right now. This may be your last chance to do that in order to get product in in October. You're making these decisions now and maybe there's something here that could be useful for you. So that's what I'm going to do. So I am going to share my screen. So holiday color trends 2018. I've set a little tone here by my cover. I am setting a minimalist style tone and that's exactly what we're going for this season. And as I go forward, I'll sort of clarify this and explain this a little bit more. Let's talk about why study color trends. So Pantone, Benjamin Moore, pretty much all the major paint companies, Color Marketing Group, as I pointed out, Color Council, all of them put out a color trend report and they put it out for all kinds of categories. So it's different for fashion than it is for home furnishings. But I talk about it in terms of color trends. Colors can be really trendy. There can be something that comes in just for that season. It's temporary, and then it goes right back out again. But there are trends of the way color shifts. So is color getting more complex? Their color of the year is ultraviolet. Ultraviolet is a variation on this purple, which was a couple of seasons ago. Ultraviolet has shifted into being a really deep, rich galaxy. Black, blue, purple that has lots of metallic in it. Why? Because our technology for applying colors and paints has changed. I mean, just think about how the color quality on cars has changed over time. Our ability to paint in specific types of finishes has changed, and that affects the color choices that we make as well. So that's part of why we study color trends. The way that we do is because things are shifting and happening in that color palette, that color family. But also, overall, we look at colors and we might see a shift of what's happening there as well. I look at lots of different companies when I talk about color trends, so I don't look at it in terms of just Pantone's offering or just color marketing groups. And I used to be a member. I haven't been a member in a while because I think that the way that they choose their colors and the way that it goes about, it's a little bit of color by committee, and I don't love that. I like to have lots of external inputs. You'll hear this time and again when I talk about my research process determining colors and design trends. I look all over the world. Rabu, Benjamin Moore. I look at what's going on in different marketplaces and industries because they all have a lot of money to invest in their research, and they can't be wrong. They have to get it right more often than they get it wrong. And so I really work hard to make sure and look at that and say, okay, overall, are the greens getting greener? Are they getting bluer? Are they getting yellower? Are they getting bluer? Are the reds getting hotter and brighter? Are they getting darker and more somber? And so really look at colors from that standpoint and see what's going on. And then I apply them to a holiday palette, obviously, because at the holiday season, there's going to be red and green. So you're always going to start with some kind of red and green, some kind of neutral, whitish color of some kind. And so how does that look and how does that work? If you look just at the color trends going on, on the Amazon marketplace, you would think that this is going to be our Christmas look. This actually was last year's Christmas look more than it is this year's Christmas look. So you might be making wrong choices on trends and find yourself with a much more limited market. So if you brought in a lot of rose gold or this sort of pink tone that's going on, you wouldn't be totally off trend because obviously it's a bell curve kind of thing. So you'll catch a bit of sales from doing that. So doing last year's is not the worst thing ever because there's a segment of the market that doesn't catch up to what the prevailing fashion trends, the fashion forward trends are going on. But at a limited buy time, when you walk into Target, Walmart, Costco, Bed Bath and Beyond, even Michaels and Joann's and you walk into all those stores and you're not seeing rose gold anymore, you're seeing a different color. That's when people start to go, I'm out of trend and should I buy that? And oh, is that going to last as long? So unless you're really just personally in love with rose gold and it's your favorite metal ever, are you really going to do that? You have the sort of peer pressure that goes on with trends. This is why I want to bring this up to you because you would get it wrong if you just studied Pinterest, if you just went off of what was going on on Amazon itself. Because remember, we haven't seen what's coming in for this holiday yet onto Amazon. So it would give us a false sense of where we need to go. So this is what happens that Happy and Bright is last year's Christmas card. This believe actually it's supposed to be an AR card. The card is sparkly and the lights all change. It's not working in my PowerPoint. I couldn't get it to work. This is the idea. It's a little more interactive, it's a little more dimensional, it's a little more simplified. And so that's the prevailing trends that I see going on across things. We're going to talk about this type of stuff a little bit more in the design trends, which is coming up a little bit later this week. I'm going to talk about the design trends side of things on Thursday. So right now though, what we're seeing is this less happy and bright kind of mentality and much more of peace and serenity. Believe so every year Tom and I do a 3D print angel ornament. I'm going to show them to you on the design trend side. And every year we have a theme that we put on there, and it's just a single word that's printed on the bottom of the ornament. And so we've done a piece one. We've done inspire one. This year, the theme is believe. When we set that tone, it sets a very different tone, because that's a much different, deeper mentality than let's be joyous, if joyous was our word, or joyful, rejoice. We did rejoice one year. It's a little bit different than that. Believe sets a tone, and so you're going to see that coming across. There's a lot of the thought process and a lot of that understanding built into it already. So, anyway, we want to get to that place where the right color sells more. So 2017 trends. That's what you're seeing over on the left. I'm sure if you were shopping for products in China, that's what you're going to see everywhere. That's the color palette they're going to be presenting to you because they'll be presenting to you. Last year, they won't present to you new colors. It happens very rarely. So last year we had an overall somber tone, a graying of the palettes across the year that cascaded into the fourth quarter. And when it continued in the holidays, though, it sparked up a little bit and got a little bit more fun. And it happened in the form of these neutralized metallics. But you can see there's a little bit of aqua there. The yellow gold has a little bit of green tint to it. The grays are blue. So you see that happening. And so now the slide I showed you at the very beginning is starting to make a little bit sense. So we still have a little bit of that darkening and graying of the tone, but it's getting a little richer and a little deeper and a little clearer, and it's being offset with white. Not neutrals, not like cream rose gold. It's not happening with those kind of neutrally colors, which you see as those sort of beigey metallic colors for the ornaments on the left. So anyway, we're moving also to longer seasonal use of color, so wanting to make the most out of your fourth quarter investment, so that when you decorate your home, or you do it for the holidays, you do it pre Thanksgiving and it lasts all the way to New Year's, thinking about that as having a much longer seasonal use and maybe not so Christmas focused. And so we're seeing a little bit of other colors creeping into the palette rather than just red and green. And so we're going to talk a little bit about that today. So this is the trend tone that I'm sending for the color forecast for 2018 holiday. So are you ready to predict the future? Because, remember, it's really is a prediction. I could be wrong. I've been doing this for 25 years, and I can tell you that I'm rarely wrong. My clients count on me to be right. So you're in good hands. I've been doing this a long time. This is not a guess. It's the best guess, though, or it's the most educated guess. The prediction that I can make based on everything I see going on, based on what's going on in the marketplace, it's based on what's going on with paint finishes and materials and all of these things. So this is the best I can do. So I am definitely better at seeing into the future than most. Here's our red. So velvetized red pear. That's what I'm calling it. Red velvet pear deep red with purple undertones. And you can see that it's got this depth going on. It's got a light and darks like velvet has. It's got a little more natural quality to the red rather than that artificial Christmassy red that we get where it's almost too bright and it's almost too odd. It just doesn't have the feel of anything we see in the natural world, but this red does. And so that's where I'm projecting the red to go. And you can see it here because this is our red pear pantone color. That's the color they've been using in fashion and other areas. And so it's a cascade of that, but metallicizing it a little bit. So we're bringing it a little brighter, a little cleaner, a little more fun, but we're keeping that same tone of it. Here you go. So how are you going to tell your factory that this is what you want? Well, you're going to give them this pantone number. And for those of you who don't know what pantone colors are, Pantone is the prevailing body in creating color standards and ships. You can buy an entire pantone library. You can buy a color wheeled color palette. They don't have always the newest colors on them. When you buy the limited palette, I prefer to go with what you see here is TCX or the TXS which is the textile color of it, because I think it gives you a little more crop material look. So whether it's gonna be in plastic or in metal or in fabric or in paint, is it gonna give you this kind of color? I think it gives you the most grayish version of it. So the dirtiest version of it, if you might look at it that way, because when you put color into materials, it kind of absorbs it. When you paint it on the surface, it reflects it. Sometimes that shine gives us a false sense of what the color is actually gonna be like in the products that we're choosing. So I like to go here, or I like to use what they call UC or uncoated colors when I specify them and when I give them to my factories. Most factories have sets of Pantone colors or have access to buy a single chip if they don't have it. You can do that too. You can go to Pantone directly. You can buy color palettes online. It doesn't really matter if you buy last year's palette, because it just won't be highlighting these colors as trends. But typically, the colors exist somewhere in the library, or you can just buy a few separate ones, like this year's palette. So that's where we're going with this. So our red is going into this deeper, darker, burgundy, ish red called Red Pear. And let's head into what our green is looking like. Our green is looking like black forest green. So it still has a little bit of that yellow undertone, but it also has a little bit of blue, depending on the light, depending on how it's looked at. But it's really deep and dark, and you see a lot of blacks and grays in the color. So you see it really, really deep depending on the lighting. So we have both yellow and blue undertones at the same time. And I know that sounds odd, but obviously that's how green's made. But it's really dependent on how you treat the color or how you're utilizing the color. And when you metallicize a green, you're able to get both things working for you. And that's the real direction that I'm seeing going on with this color. I don't have a Pantone specifically for this because I chose black forest green from Benjamin Moore as my flat line. I'm sure that exists out there in a Pantone ship as well. I just haven't quite found the one I was looking for. They have one that they. I don't think they call it forest green, but it's similar to that, but it's a little bit yellower than the black forest green from Benjamin Moore, our other holiday trends. So, remember, I told you that we were going beyond red and green this year? Well, we're bringing in a lot of violet. That ultra violet. That is the pantone color of the year for 2018. We're bringing it in a little more rich tone, and that's why I'm calling it ultra velvet violet. And it's got a lot more blue undertones into this purple that you'll be seeing. You can see that reflecting is sort of in that color with the dew drops and everything on it. But see over in the bottom area with those fingernails, what you're seeing is it mixed with the burgundy, right? And it's starting to really spark up, and it's starting to really see how you might use purple almost like a neutral, using purple like a black. And it's becoming part of that palette. So, yes, you can use it as an accent, but you can also be using it as neutralized in the palette. And we're going to talk a little bit more, because that fingernail trend is a little bit of a hint at what's to come on our design side. So, as I mentioned, ultraviolet is pantone color of the year. That's that color number. You can see the richness that it's coming in, the fruits, what's going on, environmental kind of color, this galaxy kind of color. I mean, yes, maybe it's a little Star wars based. Who knew what was influencing them to call it the color of the year at the time? There's what they say, and then there really is what's happening. But this was the way we were seeing color going, getting much more complex and much less flat in the overall process, and that's going to work really well for holiday 2018. I also wanted to kind of show you this gray with white and white with gray. So we're talking about really dark gray, almost charcoal gray. And that's kind of a really green gray over on the right hand side. So the white with a green gray that's going on, and that's black forest gray in the background there on that tree. So you're starting to see this sort of like what happens when we mix in white. And instead of mixing just white, this year, we're bringing in grays. We're bringing in more grays again, just like there were last year. But the grays are getting a little bit richer. So we're going to talk about those grays gray metallics is what we're really getting. So you can see up in the top a whole different slew of charcoals, and I call them graphite X because there's silvers mixed in there, but they're also like black chromes and other things that have been mixed into there. And you go all the way down from light to dark, from this darker graphite almost black, to warm silver, which you're seeing in the bottom right corner in those votives. You see that down there mixed with that cream color, which is not the trend. It's going much more white than this. I didn't have one with white candles in it, but you would see a much more concerted difference in where that warm silver has a much more silver scent, and it becomes much more of this bright, light neutral when you blend it with the white. So charcoal. This is Pantone's charcoal. I'm calling it graphite X this year because I think you can go even darker than that in tone. You can see it's a very blue gray. It's got a lot of blues and purples in that tone, and that's going right along with the way that we sing the overall palette. So it fits right in whites. As you know, I was talking about those whites. They have a very silver and blue undertone. Again, less cream, more towards the silver gray. And so we're seeing a lot of that shift right now in it. But with white, it's lighting as well, so it has an effect on everything that you do there. Pristine white is the color. I don't actually have a pantone chip of it that looks any good, because when I looked at it, the chip that shows up on the computer looks like a little ivory, but it's not. It has this really crisp white color. And so that's the pristine white is the color that I would use. If you have to actually match to white, which most people do, because there are millions of whites, and white dust doesn't happen naturally. It's usually either the natural color of a material or it's bleached in to get to the color tone that it needs to be. So you should have a white ship. Again, this is the overall palette. Kind of wanted to see it grouped together here. So we've got black forest and graphite and ultraviolet, ultra velvet, violet, red velvet, pear, warm silver. And I'm calling the white, the pristine white white roses here. The reason why that's coming in is there was a trend for part of the MeToo movement for women to be carrying white roses at one of the awards ceremony in Hollywood. And we're seeing that sort of starkness between them all wearing black with white roses to seeing that starkness happen. That's really where this white is coming into it. And you can see it. It sort of sets the the tone for the. But it also kind of sparks the rest of the palette. So if it didn't have that color there, everything would be a lot grayer and darker and more somber. And it's that offset against the white that is sparking it. So make sure you get the white right. So that's the palette for holiday 2018. And by holiday, we mean fourth quarter, not fourth of July, because that's coming up. None of those things. So Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's, that whole holiday season. And these are the colors that I'm predicting we're going to be seeing more of out in the marketplace. So you can check me out and see if I'm right this year. And maybe at the end of the year we'll do a recap and see what happens, see if it was right next year, probably right at the start of January. I'll be giving you the forecast early next year because product launch hazards obviously didn't exist past January, so at least not in this form for me to share the holiday trend color palette with you. So I hope that helps you make some decisions. And as always, you can tune in to any office hours here on product launch hazards. You can reach out to me via email if you have questions about the palette. The slideshare will be up in the post so you will have access to all of those images I just showed you. So if you didn't get a chance to write the pantones down, you'll be able to do that. I ask that you're really, really kind and do not share that SlideShare with anyone who's not a member because this is a significant member benefit and you certainly want to have one up over your competitors. And I always share it. But after the season, if you share it out too soon, then you're going to get a lot of copycats on you and you might end up with competition in your strategy. So you want to use this like competitive intelligence that it is for your purposes and for you making smart choices as you head into making some final decisions about what you're going to be selling this holiday season, what you're going to sell to maximize your sales this fourth quarter of 2018. So thanks again and tune in next time to another office hours.

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