Is Coloro the biggest challenge to Pantone’s dominance of the colour market?

WGSN, the world’s leading forecaster of global trends, recently launched its own colour-coding system, Coloro, in partnership with China Textile Information Center (CTIC) – and it’s a system that could change the way we all talk about colour.

Pantone’s colour matching system dominates – but Coloro is based on and entirely different methodology, and could pose a challenge to Pantone’s dominance.

Part of the appeal of Coloro is its extensive library populated with 3,500 colours. But its star feature is a seven-digit unique code that’s given to each colour.

The code is based on a 100-year-old colour methodology pioneered by Albert H. Munsell, who put forward the idea that colour – or rather, how we perceive colour – is based on hue variation, lightness values and chroma values (saturation).

The first three digits of the Coloro code depict the hue (0-160), the middle two depict the lightness (0-99), and the last two depict the chroma (0-99).

“This methodology was really limited at that time [when Munsell first developed it]... But we developed [it] further with our Chinese partner [CTIC] who did 20 years of research [into] how humans sortand see colour,” says Thorsten Traugott, managing director of Coloro.

Coloro created its colour collection after working closely with an 80-strong VIP colour panel to decide which colours to include – out of a possible 1.6 million colours it had originally coded. The panel included representatives from consumer brands like Adidas, Desigual, Schwarzkopf, Volkswagon, as well as department store Macy’s.

“When we reached out to them, they were all open because colour is such an important topic for them,” Traugott says.

He adds: “They also placed [requests like], ‘we need more greys’, because greys are a weakness in other [colour] systems – and we identified 350 greys. Everyone is using grey, even for the standard collection. Sometimes greys are the best-selling products for some companies.”