Historically, physical color standards have been the foundation of color communication throughout the textile and apparel industry. They're familiar, tangible, and deeply embedded in traditional workflows.

But as digital product creation has become the norm, many teams are asking an important question:

Do physical standards still offer the most efficient way to communicate color?

Getting color right once is one thing. Getting the same color across materials, suppliers, production lots, and locations is the real challenge.

So, what tools make color consistency easier to manage?

In textile workflows color is often treated as a visual reference, when in reality, it is critical data. If that data isn’t centralized, stable, and measurable, color outcomes are left open to interpretation, variation, and avoidable risk across the supply chain. 

Traditionally, most color teams have relied on physical color standards - Fabric swatches dyed and shipped by a standard provider. The limitations of these established standard libraries are well-known…

Digital color technology is not new. It has been around and utilized by brands and suppliers for decades. Some teams, however, still have difficulty letting go of a physical/visual process.

Link to Sourcing Journal’s Fireside Chat featuring Doug Bynum and Marc Levine discussing creating custom color references that can be printed on site in minutes (nSPIRE ColorCards)