The Pantone Company Sells Color by Number
Pantone is a tiny New Jersey company that licenses a proprietary numbering system for ink. Your brand's color is probably a rented phone number.
Lawrence Herbert bought a small printing-ink company called Pantone in 1962 for about $50,000. The problem he set out to solve was dull: printers and designers argued constantly over whether a "deep red" meant this red or that red. Herbert issued a fan book in 1963 that gave every ink mix a number — PMS 185, PMS 032 — and persuaded the printing industry to buy the book.
Pantone's business is lexical. The company doesn't sell ink or pigment; it sells the right to call a color by its number, and it sells the printed fan guides that keep everyone's numbers in sync. A graphic designer specs "PMS 485." A printer in Shanghai mixes from the Pantone formula, checks the proof against the Pantone-issued guide, and ships. The whole supply chain converges on a small New Jersey office with a color-matching laboratory.
The licensing model means color can be contested. In 2022, Adobe and Pantone ended a long licensing deal, and subscribers who opened older Illustrator files found their carefully-specified Pantone colors replaced with black. Users learned they had been renting their brand colors all along, from a company with the right to switch off the name.
Pantone also curates a Color of the Year, starting in 2000, announced each December by a team that claims to survey global cultural mood. The 2022 choice was Very Peri, a periwinkle, announced alongside a press release that cited "a new era reshaped by the pandemic." The paint and fashion industries treat the announcement like a quarterly earnings report.
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