Pantone’s Color of the Year for 2022, Very Peri, made its debut last week. The “joyous” periwinkle blue hue is predicted to be a popular choice for merchandise next year.
For the first time, the Color of the Year is a newly created color that didn’t previously exist within the Pantone library. Now designated as 17-3938, Very Peri marks a new building block in Pantone’s color language.
“Futuristic in feeling, Pantone 17-3938 Very Peri is a dynamic periwinkle blue hue with a vivifying violet red undertone that takes on distinct appearances through application to different materials, finishes and textures, from shimmery metallics, lustrous sheens and high-tech materials to handcrafted looks and natural fibers,” said Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute.
To help brands quickly develop products using Very Peri, X-Rite and its subsidiary Pantone have added the shade’s spectral data to PantoneLive, a cloud-based digital system that standardizes color. PantoneLive maintains color consistency across the supply chain, enabling designers, suppliers and marketers to collaborate and accurately communicate around color, so they can prototype and produce goods across categories including textiles and plastics.
“Digital color standards help brands capitalize on consumer trends by accelerating both the design and production on new products,” Elley Cheng, vice president and general manager of Pantone, told Sourcing Journal. “Since Very Peri is a new Pantone color, it’s not a color that designers and suppliers may have in their catalog.”
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Suppliers, such as dye houses, can use PantoneLive Production for Plastic, Coatings, and Textile to formulate colors. PantoneLive is linked with X-Rite’s Color iMatch software for color formulation, and it also connects to the Color iQC program, which enables manufacturers to rapidly roll out color quality control. Within the production process, digital standards can help save time and money by preventing delays and costly redos.
“In apparel and footwear manufacturing, often times a color such as Very Peri needs to match across different types of materials and between multiple suppliers,” Cheng said. “If you are only using physical standards to communicate color across the supply chain, you need to create and ship as many physical standards as you have materials and suppliers. That’s increasingly expensive and time consuming.” She added that it typically takes around 12 tries to get color matching correct with a physical standard, whereas digital standards and software allow for a match on the first attempt.
Very Peri data will also be available through Pantone Connect, a centralized platform that enables collaboration between design teams, clients and others involved in the design process. The functionalities of Pantone Connect include the ability to create mood boards and design color palettes with specific hues. These color samples can then be accessed anywhere, creating a shared reference point.
As part of the digital design process, product development teams can also create virtual material samples in Very Peri using X-Rite’s Pantora software. The application can model the color accurately on digitized materials ranging from fabric to mesh, paints, plastics and metals, showing details such as texture and gloss. Designers may also take a physical material and turn it into a virtual sample by measuring characteristics with the X-Rite Ci7000 Series, MA-T12 or MetaVue VS3200 spectrophotometers.
The virtual material samples made in Pantora can then be sent to product lifecycle management systems and 3D rendering tools, enabling developers to design with them digitally.
“Companies can render the material in virtual scenes to see how lighting, gloss or special pigments affect the appearance of the material,” Cheng said. “This streamlines the design phase without the need to create multiple physical prototypes.”