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Colour Management is the cornerstone of the retail clothing buying cycle - if colours are not decided, matched and ready, production will be late - a familiar story ?  However, using cutting edge techniques proven in one of the largest clothing retailers in Europe this need not be the case.

As more retail buying comes from off shore locations the problems (and associated costs and pressures on delivery) are increasing daily.

For an assessment of how digital colour specification could help your business - retailer, fabric/garment maker or dyer :

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Colour Management - Challenges and Rewards

Chris Sargeant – Colour True (formerly Head of Colour Management at Marks & Spencer)

As any apparel retailer will confirm, colour is the key to whether a shopper makes a purchase or merely passes by.

Colour is the first thing to attract our eyes to an item on entering a clothing store – if it is appealing we will move closer, look at the style, feel the fabric and, having found the right size, maybe go to the fitting room to try it on. Where the item still appeals on closer examination we make a subconscious estimate of its value and then look at the price ticket. If the price is about the same as our estimate we think it is good value and most likely go ahead and buy.

The colour needs to be "fashion right" within its context and season – interpretations across ranges of styles and fabrics need to harmonise in a pleasing way and all components within an article need to match each other acceptably – and, by the way, this must be the case not only in the store, but also outside in daylight and of course in the customers’ home under artificial lighting.

In addition to all of the above, the colour must not run in the rain, bleed in the wash, or fade in sunlight. Dyestuffs or printing inks must not pollute the environment or cause the eventual wearers to itch.

Pictures of the coloured article on store show cards, in direct mail catalogues or on internet shopping sites must be exact matches to the original.

Repeat production runs must also be indistinguishable from the original whether from the same producer or not.

Achieving all of the above should not add cost or delay production – or, as a dyer friend of mine used to say " the impossible we do all of the time but miracles take a little longer !".

These are but a few of the more obvious challenges to a colour management system. It is not just about how to manage matching of lab dyes to a palette as many articles on the subject seem to suggest. These challenges embrace all of the processes and technologies from design through product development, production, cataloguing, advertising, marketing, packaging and display right through to the final customer – in a bricks and mortar store, via clicks on the internet or from a catalogue.

Whatever the route, if the colour does not look right or if the product does not match the catalogue or web page it will be returned – colour issues are probably the largest single cause of returns in catalogue or internet shopping for clothes.

So where are we and where are we going ?

There are a whole gamut of technologies, both established and emerging which seek to address the issues of managing colour – from Computer Aided design (CAD), Colour Measurement, Colour on Screen (eg Imagemaster), Digital Store Cataloguing, 3D store visualisation plus aids to standard viewing such as e-color, Color Vision and Web Sync.

These technologies need to interface seamlessly in order to deliver a coherent service to the retail industry. Unfortunately, since they have all grown up independently in a compartmentalised way, they do not at present relate easily to one another – however, the commercial pressures on the industry are beginning to lean on the system providers to meet their needs more comprehensively.

The retail sector is overshopped and more competitive than ever before – the primary battleground of competition being in getting fashion right styles fabrics and colours to the market place quicker than your rival and at a cost which will seem good value to the consumer.

In manufacturing terms this means translating design intelligence into production specifications for fabric, shape, fit, colour, size ratios etc , communicating them to the producers quickly and then being in a position to monitor production to ensure requirements are being met. All of this over a global supply base often with multiple suppliers of the same product (in order to achieve required volumes) in many different countries, cultures & time zones. As an example, in M&S we bought in volume from over 300 suppliers in 70 countries around the world and handled over 20,000 colour swatch submissions alone per year.

Traditionally, the industry has relied on making physical samples, be they colour swatches, print strike offs or complete finished garments as the means of deciding what it wants to buy and communicating this down the supply chain.

Colour is the linchpin of the process – until colour is decided, no fabric can be dyed, accessories matched, sewing threads bought or even packaging ordered.

Not only is this an extremely slow process, it represents a huge on cost which most managements seem unaware of.

In Marks & Spencer we developed colour technology to high level in the earlier part of the supply chain – taking colour originated in design through to production on a massive scale.

Our objective was to produce the Right Colours and Styles at the Right Time and in the Right Quality – in addition, a multitude of fabrics trimmings and accessories from across the world need to be colour matched to provide attractive choice and coordination at the point of sale.

M&S Colour Management embraces Colour Creation, Communication, and Control – starting with design and following through production to the finished article in the store.

Traditionally, this process was based on creating fabric swatches to represent the colours, issuing to the producers, and visually checking production against them.

Not surprisingly as the business grew this led increasingly to delays, frustrations and arguments !

Clearly this approach would not support the increasing internationalisation of the business.

A strategy was developed in the early nineties to harness available technology to our advantage and:

Specify colour by numbers

Set clear and measurable pass/fail limits

Suppliers make decisions

Manage exceptions

With the projected benefits;

Consistent Quality

Supplier Self Approval

Elimination of Delays

Reduced costs

Achieving these objectives required:

Precise Colour Standards

Accurate & reliable measuring systems

Accreditation of users

Support & Training

Right First Time at Dyers

Precise Colour Standards were developed based on 16 pt spectral reflectance measurements - carried out under closely controlled conditions.

A comprehensive accreditation scheme to ensure uniformity and precision in approach was developed to ensure all parties played their part and used colour measurement systems correctly – this provided a bed rock of confidence in the numerical approach and enabled users to focus on interpreting measurements rather than questioning their validity.

Instead of fabric swatches being sent from far flung dyehouses to illustrate colour matches, the company is now receiving e-mailed electronic submissions from an ever increasing number of sources around the world.

The effect of introducing the numerical approach to colour was to dramatically cut the time taken to get new colours into stores and reduce associated costs – up to two months was saved in some cases whilst operating costs of colour management fell by over 30%.

With the introduction of accurate Colour on Screen systems such as Imagemaster, developed by UMIST with sponsorship by M&S & key suppliers, colours can now be precisely visualised on calibrated screens enabling dyers to make virtual lab dyes to transmit and discuss with their customers and in many cases go straight to bulk production.

In addition to numerous M&S suppliers around the world, Burlington International in Hurt Virginia are now using this approach successfully with major US customers.

Garment makers can visualise complete garments showing how ranges of colours will look or how electronically submitted components will go together if called in.

IMAGEMASTER represents a quantum leap in the technology of colour and product visualisation. It opens up the way to realistic communication between buyer and seller, designer and dyer by electronic means.

* For detailed descriptions of the considerable work carried out at UMIST in conjunction with M&S and key suppliers to bring this to fruition see refs 1 & 2.

Many CAD type tools are incorporated such as image separation to allow use on patterns and prints as well as plain fabrics.

Clearly if on screen colour visualisation systems are to replace visual inspection of fabrics and swatches users must believe that what you see is what you get.

For this to occur not only do we require fully calibrated systems and standardised viewing conditions but also precisely controlled image capture techniques.

Much work is currently in hand to develop and specify those methods so that images can be directly input via a digital camera using standard lighting and exposure conditions.

A with other branches of photography lighting and exposure are key to the image produced.

Colours can be superimposed on images using either keyboard entered reflectance data or direct measurement from a spectrophotometer.

To date results are encouraging although much is still to be done to resolve many of the practical issues and produce a fully commercially viable user-friendly system.

Lab dyes are a substantial overhead – typically costing from £50 ($75)) each plus the cost of sending them to the customer – ie a medium sized dyehouse producing 100 lab dyes per week with typically three submissions per shade is spending £15,000 ($22,500) every week to provide this service. By moving the majority of this work load to virtual lab dyes, substantial savings in time and money can be made leading to higher productivity and quicker deliveries.

With a numerical approach, provided production is within agreed tolerances, no submissions are necessary prior to delivery. Even where, in borderline cases they are required, virtual submissions can be made within hours rather than days of weeks for physical samples.

It is therefore not difficult to justify the costs of setting up a Colour Measurement/Colour on Screen regime.

Large American retailers led the way in off shore sourcing and have become acutely aware of effects this has had on their speed to market (or lead time) – in some cases the lead times became longer than the selling season – this meant that all buying decisions re style and colour had to be made prior to the season with absolutely no flexibility to respond to sales in season – either to increase production of good sellers or cut back on failures. Hence, the cost of write downs was high and because of this, purchases of "risky" fashion items or colours were kept low. Not surprisingly, businesses suffered.

Liz Claiborn Inc were among the first to recognise the adverse effect that protracted product development times were having on their business. The business was suffering and losing its edge.

In 1995, as part of their "Liz First" revitalisation programme they set out to use CAD to maximum effect with the objective of reducing lead times by 6/8 weeks and cut overheads, of which sampling costs were a major part, by $100 million.

With the enthusiastic support of Paul Charron, Chairman & CEO, they embarked on a programme to digitise product development and visualisation wherever possible and eliminate physical samples.

By 1998 they had 45 CAD systems in their Broadway New York HQ plus 50 fully trained operatives. To help achieve this they provided systems for the Parsons College in New York and seconded senior staff to lecture and help train new recruits.

Electronic communication was trialled with an internal intranet web and one of the first "B to B" extranet installations connecting them with their suppliers.

As a result, huge parts of their ranges were selected and bought from CAD printouts - enabling Charron to report that anticipated cost saving targets had been met by early ’98 and that the Company had now returned to continuous growth in earnings.

This was all achieved despite lukewarm support from system providers who did not understand the market requirements and the opportunities there to be seized.

Similar success in reducing the need for submissions and speeding time to market has been achieved by Westpoint Stevens – also in New York – they have nearly 30 CAD systems to develop & visualise their homeware products.

As illustrated by the examples of M&S in UK and Liz Claiborn in US there are huge benefits to be gained by embracing Colour Management technologies along with CAD and product visualisation and communication systems down the line – but in order to fully service the needs of a hungry retail industry there is much to do to weld disparate systems together for the benefit of users.

This means seamless combination of CAD and Imagemaster technologies so that accurate colours can be created directly at design stage, viewed in accurate colour on screen, printed correctly and numerically fed to dyers systems for recipes and to web sites for precise visualisation by the customer.

Achieving these objectives will require standardisation of technical specification of colour through all media systems and collaboration between equipment makers – today, we do not even have agreement about the specification of standard daylight – dyers use D 65 whilst print/packaging use D50. VDU screens have their own approach and therefore need to come in line.

Digital printer technology needs to adapt – currently a range of printers will produce different colours from a given set of data – even on the same substrate ! This is not acceptable. Colour Measurement technology with standard procedures and calibration back to a master instrument now enables a set of data to reproduce the precise colour required by any accredited user across the world – printers need to follow the same approach. At present the only option is user applied profiling which is tedious and a poor compromise.

Despite the many hurdles still to be overcome there is now widespread recognition of the potential rewards of "moving digital" – and the dire consequences for those who do not !.

The world’s largest retailers are now leading the charge to implement and further develop systems and the pace is quickening by the day.

CITDA, the US based Computer Integrated Textile Design Association is dedicated to bringing standardisation about and since it is heavily retailer driven must have a good chance of success.

There are encouraging signs of collaboration between colour measurement system providers and CAD companies (eg Datacolor and Lectra) which should bear fruit during the next 6/12 months. There is also considerable effort being directed towards electronic communication between parties in the supply chain – DuPont ES Net was the first in this field and tried to be too ambitious too soon but Applied Intranet Technologies, Gerber, Lectra and some other CAD vendors are also developing systems. These fledgling initiatives need to be encouraged and spread much wider to embrace manufacturers of printers, vdu’s, cameras, and providers of web technology.

In conclusion, I do not necessarily see a world in which no real garments or fabric samples will ever be produced prior to placing an order – I do however see the huge potential for systems to help filter design ideas to those commercially worth sampling – with massive savings in time and money in the product development cycle.

Once buying decisions are made, the chain of technology can then enable smooth and rapid communication of all requirements to producers down the line and enable monitoring of progress at every stage.

Combined together, these twin approaches will become the industry norms of the near future and success in their exploitation will define those who prosper from those who will fall by the wayside.

Chris Sargeant – Colour True

November 22nd 2000                      Top of Page                                  Home    

Chris Sargeant was until recently head of Colour Management for Marks & Spencer and responsible for the introduction of digital specification and communication of colour. This work was also recognised with a Fellowship of the Society of Dyers & Colourists.

He is a member of CITDA and has been a speaker at their recent world symposium in Charlotte NC.

Chris has now set up Colour True colour management Consultancy to assist retailers, manufacturers, print/ink suppliers and dyers in developing systems appropriate to their businesses.

Contacts: ChrisSargeant@ColourTrue.com Web: www.ColourTrue.com

 

References

D P Oulton, I Porat C Boston & R Walsby of UMIST "Precision colour communication based on CIE calibrated monitor screens" – 5th International conference on High Technology – WORLD TECHNO FAIR IN CHINA Sept 11-14 1996.

D P Oulton C J Boston R Walsby, UMIST "Building a precision colour imaging system" – 4th Color Imaging Conference, Systems and applications.

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