Tweet

Made in the Shade

Forget financial forecasting. Old Greenwich resident Leslie Harrington is all about forecasting the year’s hottest colors. She should know — she helped to create them

Photograph by: Bob Capazzo

Roughly twelve years ago, when Leslie Harrington was eight months pregnant, she found herself in the whirlwind of a creative brainstorm, sponge-painting bubble-gum- pink flower petals on doors, stamping sparkling aquamarine stars and moons on ceilings, taping the outline of a white picket fence on a grassy green wall to evoke an enclosed garden.

Surprisingly, the activity was not for a nursery but rather her job. Through a licensing agreement with Benjamin Moore, Leslie’s employer at the time, Crayola had decided to break into the interior paint category, targeting mothers with young children in search of decorating ideas. Leslie was responsible not only for developing the products and the colors they’d be available in, but also the how-to strategy that would bring them to market. 

That strategy paid off. Under her direction, the Crayola line — including glitter, glow-in-the-dark and chalkboard paint — revolutionized the entire interior paint category, spurred on the do-it-yourself craze, and left rival brands like Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren longing for a bigger share of market. “It was a pivotal point in how to go to market with paint,” she says, hints of a lilting Canadian accent clinging to the edges of her words. “We were leveraging all the color equity Crayola had built up, making paint fool-proof and allowing people to engage their inner child.”

The Crayola revolution indeed had marked a transition for paint — from dull, function-driven exterior protection touted for its durability and reapplied only in the event of damage, to a sexy decorating tool with a new base of users including not only contractors, but also interior designers and consumers opting to paint their own bedrooms.

Despite successes such as this, over the sixteen years she spent at Benjamin Moore Leslie had grown frustrated with the prevailing attitude she encountered within the corporate ranks. “They wanted me to pick the colors and leave the big business to them. But color was the product, and they were in the paint business,” she explains. It was in this intersection of business and color that Leslie glimpsed a fan deck’s worth of opportunity. “I wanted to be able to sit at the table and speak their language.”

 Intent on exploring how companies could leverage color both to add and extract value in products and brands, she obtained an M.B.A from New York University’s Stern School of Business  and later a Ph.D. in color strategy from Capella University in Minnesota. By 2001 she had founded LH Color, a research and consulting firm that provides color-based strategic guidance to companies such as Oneida, James Hardie, Pottery Barn and many others whose contracts prohibit disclosure.

“Most clients come to me thinking they have a color problem,” she says. “But usually it’s a strategy issue that needs to be resolved. The positioning of a product may not be right, or may not even exist.”

Often corporations approach her with a new product — from pills to dinner plates — and ask her to determine what color it should be. She and her team immediately delve into the investigative process. They ask the client to define their market position, describe their audience and analyze their competitive set.

If the client cannot answer the questions, she probes further. She wants to know the length of the product cycle; how fast products turn on the shelves (six months for fashion; a lifetime for a pill); how many are introduced per year (one collection for dinnerware; two for roofing products if they’re relaunching); how many colors the manufacturing line can handle (1,000 to 2,000 for paint; twenty-six for exterior siding, for example); what colors sell better than others (the pink Razor cell phone was a huge hit).

“People don’t realize we’re thinking about that. They think we just say, ‘Wow, pink is hot this year, you gotta have pink,’” she says. “But a critical component to developing a color line is understanding that every color is an individual SKU that costs money to manufacture, package, ship and put on the store shelf.” It is this keen grasp of business fundamentals that her clients most appreciate. 

“If I say the company needs to offer a product in ten colors, it’s with an understanding of the operational constraints they may face,” she says. “If a cell phone manufacturer’s design team demands twenty colors, research and development may have a heart attack, insisting they can produce only four. The key is to get to the smallest number of colors that generate the biggest amount of business. It’s a surprising blend of art and
science — and lots of intuition.”

Bringing Color Home

On a bitingly chilly Sunday morning early last December, the color guru opens the trap door to her home office in Old Greenwich. Reluctantly. When the hanging stairs swing down from the ceiling, she climbs up in a sidestepping style she has clearly honed over time. She advises her guest to do the same. “As you can see, I don’t really like people coming up here,” she says. “I broke my wrist when I tumbled off the ladder while hanging the sheetrock.”

There is a method to her madness. The space we have entered is her lofty hideaway, the place to which she retreats when embarking on a large project, such as mapping a color strategy for a previously non-color company like the fiber cement siding manufacturer James Hardie or conceptualizing Culinaria, Oneida’s new four-part, solid-color dinner service destined for a category dominated by whiteware. Featuring chili-red plates, pound-cake yellow mugs and blue sage saucers. Culinaria is positioned as a competitor to Fiestaware and currently selling well in more than 450 Bed Bath & Beyond stores after months of back-and-forth with glazers to obtain the precise shades Leslie conceived — a process of constant matching and adapting that is par for the course.

Before she leased her studio in Manhattan’s Garment District, this red and white home office was her center, her full-time hub for hues, so to speak. Occupying the entire length of an attic with sloping ceilings and windows on either end that bathe the space in natural light, the studio is decorated with foam-core idea boards covered in color chips and image clippings. Her tools of the trade include paint samples, swatches and a 72-piece set of color markers, as well as natural materials — a stone she found, a leaf she picked up — that have prompted a thought. Inside the eaves, accessible only through a secretly removable canvas panel in the wall, she stores her inspiration: a stash of magazines, Elle Décor, Vogue, House & Garden. “I’m a magazine junkie,” she says, “and a color junkie.”

Asked if she creates color, she says, “If you’re asking whether I make the decisions on what colors consumers will buy, then yes.” She then admits to a considerable amount of do-it-herself mixing to arrive at such colors. Shod in orange, turquoise and black sneakers, she gestures toward a wall where she has consolidated her collection of color toys, items such as Rubik’s Cube (the first game based solely on color) and Mensa’s deck of color-themed trivia cards. “All of these teach you something about color,” she says.

Two floors down, in this neo-traditional house painted a heathered moss with a teal front door, she is about two-thirds of the way through her latest interiors project: repainting the green dining room raspberry — Benjamin Moore’s Gypsy Pink 2077-20 to be precise. The task requires a mere morning of her time, including taping and drying, yet one is hard-pressed to find a single stray brush stroke. “It’s an instant pick-me-up,” she says, quick to point out the need for cheeriness in challenging economic times. “This is a great update on the quintessential red dining room.”

It’s also the cheapest and fastest way to alter a room. An unrepentant change-artist, Leslie is currently contemplating painting a wide stripe the width of the table on the far wall. Within the boundaries of that stripe she thinks, she just might build in a custom leather bench. Infatuations like these don’t last much longer than two or three years, she says. Much more than that and she gets the urge to change again.

On the subject of the ever-popular red dining room, Leslie believes that Greenwich residents — and those in the rest of the Northeast — show a disproportionate devotion to the concept. She has gathered the evidence for her theory from countless after-dark neighborhood driving tours when indoor lights switch on and interiors become visible in vivid color.

“People intuitively know that it works; it stimulates both the appetite and conversation,” she says. “But you can tone it down to burgundy, or you can go blue or green to create a different mood in the room.” As for her own dining room redo, she has just realized that the recently delivered white leather chairs are from two different dye lots. It’s a good bet the manufacturer will hear from her.

Bright Future

Exactly how did this maven with straw-colored hair and not-quite-sapphire eyes find her life’s colorway?

It began in Toronto, in adolescence. A congenitally shy fifteen-year-old, she was urged by her mother to work in her paint and wallpaper shop. She learned the ropes by interacting with customers, mixing paints and operating the tint machines. “Consequently, I grew up hating paint,” she says. As a diversion, she thought about becoming a stockbroker and then migrated to architecture. “But my grades weren’t good enough.” So she pursued interior architecture with a focus on design, which, she is quick to add, did not carry the cachet of architecture at the time.

After completing a bachelor’s degree at Toronto’s International Academy of Design & Merchandising, she went to work for Benjamin Moore, which was introducing a new color-matching technology. The woman responsible for promoting the technique around the country had fallen ill and Leslie was asked to pinch-hit. Ultimately she worked her way up to director of color and design at the company’s headquarters in Montvale, New Jersey, before leaving to start her own firm.

Then in 2007, while still at the helm of LH Color, she took over the reins of the Color Association of the United States. Since 1915 the association has provided long-term color forecasting to thousands of members worldwide, including fashion, textile and interior designers, home furnishings manufacturers and technology companies that ultimately market products in premeditated colors they hope will attract consumers.

Under the auspices of the Color Association, she convenes annual roundtables of industry insiders (fashion designers, home furnishings manufacturers, paint-makers) to ruminate on prevailing social, psychological and global influences — an imminent election, a faltering economy, a lagging war, an Olympics in Beijing, among others.

Together they release reports laden with color swatches organized into themed collections with names like Rock Crystal and Vegetable Garden that give the industry general guidance on forthcoming trends of what hues consumers will be drawn to in the upcoming season. The accompanying synopses are hardly short on opining statements that reflect the trends at large. The summary of the 2009/2010 forecast released in 2008, for example, stated:

“America’s wish to lessen the damaging consequences on our environment [has put] eco-friendly and sensitive design on everyone’s mind, even the growing foodie movement with its emphasis on locally grown foods.” Such concern, it continues, has been the driver for color names like “Sustainable, Farmers’ Market, Heirloom and Seed,” which collectively “suggest the need for a gentle, almost rustic approach to future design.”

PERSONAL STYLE

Just as the Color Association offers only generalized forecasts to the industry, Leslie herself steers clear of counseling individual consumers on their interiors and fashion choices. “At cocktail parties people always ask me ‘What’s the hot new color?’ ” she says. “They just think it’s so simple. But I have to be careful because if I point to a specific color as being somewhat dated, people get upset over being out of the trend.”

Further pressed, she concedes not only that “yellow continues to be a significant color moving forward,” but also that raspberry, gray and purple will continue their surge in popularity. The reason? They are extensions of the Mother Nature-driven movement — raspberry, purple and yellow can be found in a garden. But what about gray? “There’s no real hard answer,” she says. We haven’t had it for a while, so it’s time for it to come back.” Such is the pattern with neutrals, she says.

Much as a political strategist files away his or her most victorious races or disastrous campaigns, Leslie’s references throughout time are the big moments in color.

She speaks affectionately of a particular lime-green that Volkswagen used to introduce a new automobile in the late 1990s (“a risky decision, but the color resonated with what the car was about: a rebirth, in springtime”) and waxes poetic about Apple’s transcendence of desktop-gray to big, ruby-red computers.

When a particular color flops — she cites the three consecutive attempts made by fashion designers and apparel makers to popularize chartreuse as the “it” color in the late 1990s — it’s often that the timing is off rather than that the color is wrong.

She explains, “It hits the market too early, and then it’s not given enough time to catch on before the designer discontinues it. Or it’s introduced everywhere too late, and nobody wants it anymore.”

In the case of that old acid-green chartreuse, she says, “When they first introduced it, the consumer wasn’t ready for it. But they knew that it was a good color so they came back again with a slightly less edgy version and it still didn’t make it. So then it came back again, slightly tweaked, and exploded and you saw it everywhere and the market became saturated.”

No question, color courses through Leslie’s veins. But it seems that her twelve-year-old daughter Alexis may have inherited her mother’s shade of hemoglobin-red.

Before saying our good-byes, Alexis, sporting a striped pair of wellies and a short pleated skirt, eagerly asked if she could show off her own room, which she recently gave a new look — entirely on her own: orange walls, red chair and draperies, and alternating duvets in coral and taupe.
“Originally she was going for an Oriental theme with big Chinese characters on the wall,” says Leslie, “but I didn’t want to do all the work.”

Perhaps that job would have required more than a Sunday morning.    

---

---