Without fail, there’s a single question Leatrice Eiseman gets asked. She gets asked on airplanes, in boardrooms, by CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
“What color should I paint my living room wall?” she says, laughing. Eiseman is executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, a branch of Pantone, AKA the company that developed a consistent language for how designers and manufacturers up and down the supply chain identify, create, and replicate thousands of shades of color.
“Even the CEO of the biggest corporation, you’re helping him with a color for a product that’s going to sell 5 billion units. And his last question is, ‘What color should I paint my living room?’”
Leatrice Eiseman, center, at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. (Facebook)
Eiseman is the person to ask. She’s directed the institute since 1985. She’s been called the international guru of color. Her colleagues have called her “Ms. Color in America.”
Slight and bespectacled, with a bob that rivals Anna Wintour’s, Eiseman says picking a favorite color is like picking a favorite child: She can’t.
But she does have to choose. Once a year, she’s tasked with summing up the entire world, and all its complexities, in a single color.
Every year, she oversees the brand’s wildly successful Color of the Year campaign, unveiled in early December. She turns one color into a celebrity, and watches as consumers around the world pull out their wallets for the results.
Remember Y2K?
Back in 1994, trend forecaster and writer James Woudhuysen took a big swing. “Whoever controls color, controls the world,” he wrote in Marketing magazine. That was before the era of internet dominance, but you get the idea.
As the ’90s pressed on, uncertainty about approaching the new millennium grew. Around the Pantone office in Carlstadt, New Jersey, people began to talk. What if the clocks stopped? What if our digital devices died? What if the world ended?
What if, Pantone’s CEO mused, they could give people something to feel hopeful about? He asked Eiseman to pick a color that would represent the new millennium.
Color, Eiseman thought, could be a source of joy in uncertain times. It also, according to market research, has serious purchasing power when it comes to what consumers decide to buy.
The Hustle
As has since been immortalized in the words of Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, Eiseman chose cerulean, a sky blue.
“No matter where you live, everyone looks forward to seeing a beautiful blue sky,” she says.
They announced their selection. And the campaign exploded, making headlines across the globe and solidifying Pantone’s hold on public perception as the international color authority.
“It was like we had a tiger by the tail,” she says. “I said, ‘This is something we need to revisit every year.’ There was so much interest; it really amazed us.”
The Hustle
It also helped turn the company from a design darling to a household name. Most professionals knew the company, but the average consumer didn’t.
“If you said Pantone, they’d say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a shampoo, right?’ Or, ‘Oh, it’s that good Italian bread,’” Eiseman says. “They just didn’t know what Pantone was until the Color of the Year started to get so much attention.”
The company doesn’t always get it right — it was criticized for choosing tone-deaf Living Coral in 2019, as reefs around the world faced unprecedented decay. A team of designers in Australia launched a viral counter-campaign calling the company’s choice “downright irresponsible,” and suggesting Bleached Coral instead.
Pantone has also been criticized for adding to the waste of industries like fast fashion. How big could the market for Emerald bedsheets or Serenity lipstick possibly be?
Still, over the last 25 years, the campaign has developed a propulsive life of its own. It’s been copied, partnered, styled, and covered into cultural dominance.
The birth of a lifestyle brand
Eiseman grew up in a row house in Baltimore, with a mother who she calls “an absolute demon with a paintbrush.” Every spring, her mom would repaint the entire house, piano included. (Once, she painted the broiler a pistachio green and nearly burned the house down when she plugged it back in.)
Eiseman was allowed to pick her own colors for her bedroom: She went with red and black. It was a sensibility she’d bring to her longtime home on Bainbridge Island, a 35-minute ferry ride from Seattle, where she painted her restored farmhouse a burnished shade of Rosewood.
In 1983, she published her first book, Alive with Color, a mix of color psychology, theory, and whimsy. The book caught the attention of a man named Lawrence Hebert, and he called her up. Hebert was a chemist who owned a printing company called Pantone.
Color swatches. (Ferda Demir/Getty Images)
He hired her as a consultant, and she’s led the Pantone Color Institute ever since, a role she’s held for 37 years.
Pantone began as a biochemical company, developing inks and an alphanumeric system that ensured a textile mill in Italy would understand what a designer in New York meant when they said “cobalt blue.”
In essence, it still is, its chemists mixing paints and inks in its lab in New Jersey to produce swatch books it sells to brands, designers, and manufacturers for up to $9k, though the company has also added forecasting, publishing, licensing, and consulting to its oeuvre.
Eiseman’s duties involve giving names meant to evoke emotion to more than 2k of Pantone’s 10k color swatches, like Marsala (a burgundy inspired by the fortified wines of Sicily) or Tangerine Tango, which she named after an Argentine tango dancer’s necklace.
She also helps companies develop signature branding and colors, including:
- Tiffany blue (Pantone #1837)
- Hermes orange (Pantone #1448)
- Louboutin red (Pantone #18-1663 TPX)
(In the early 2010s, she gave some colors named in the ’80s a revamp. One shade of olive brown, simply called Drab, was reborn as Cumin.)
To select the Color of the Year, she travels the world, meeting an international cabal of uber-observers — designers, trend forecasters, and cultural detectives tapped into what the world will want to buy in the coming years.
Predicting the future of color lies in constant analysis. They examine what’s coming down runways, what new paintings are hanging on museum walls, what palettes are dominating animated children’s films in production, what sporting events are coming up, and even what themes are dominating discussions on TikTok.
Thanks to a series of powerful brand partnerships, and the tipoffs that come with them, the color of the year has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Last year, Motorola, Cariuma, Hydrow, and Art Basel Miami launched products (a phone, sneakers, a rowing machine, a public art exhibit called the “Magentaverse,” respectively) in Viva Magenta, the 2023 Color of the Year, as part of, and to reinforce, Pantone’s announcement.
