What We Can Learn from New Paint Companies?

I imagine it’s happened to all of us.  You need to paint (or if you’re lucky, have painted) a wall/room/house.  You go into the store to pick “the right” paint color and are confronted with literally an infinite number of choices- because they can match any color you want.  As if the paint chips by themselves weren’t more than you could possibly parse.

Home you go with a big bunch of small chips.  After some agonization, you come back and maybe (at a paint specialty store) get some large chips.  Then on the next visit, you get some small sample paint jars and slap them on the wall.  By this time, any thoughts you may have had about being daring and, for example, having a bright accent wall has been bludgeoned out of you.  You just want to get “the right” color.

I spend way too much time choosing and about 14 nano seconds after the project is complete, it’s fine and I never think about it again.  I may not have gotten “the right” color but I sure spent a lot of time doing it.

Some new paint companies are trying to help me.  They offer curated palettes of between 50 and 150 colors.  One of the company names is actually Curator.

It was a decade or two ago when I suggested that snowboard companies should stop picking their SKUs based on what their competitors were doing.  What mattered was what your customer wanted.  More SKUs wasn’t automatically better. 

True- following your competitors’ lead was easy, but it was lazy.  It didn’t answer the question, who are my customers and what do they want?  Mostly, I think we’ve figured that out.  Many of you, I know, have cut your SKU count.  It’s good for inventory management, cost of goods sold, branding and holding margins.  May not help your top line, but it will sure help the bottom line.

Have you cut it enough?

If a paint company believes they can compete with just fifty colors against Benjamin Moore’s 3,500, well, maybe they are on to something.  When you read this article think about how they’ve tried to have colors with a common theme that fit together.  Looks to me like a lot of their colors work with each other.  These companies are betting that the customer will have a better shopping experience with fewer choices with a product I’d have previously characterized as a commodity. 

Can you make your brand special by offering fewer choices?  Perhaps a lot fewer.  You can if you improve their shopping experience.