Brand Color Consistency

When Rick Shadle visited some of Shop-Vac Corp.'s largest customers such as Lowe's and Walmart about a year ago, he was assaulted by what he calls "a carnival of colors" in the aisleways that featured his company's products.

"We were seeing a lot of big variations—there could be five or six different shades of the same color, even blacks, in our corrugated packaging," said Shadle, director of creative services for Williamsport, Pa.-based Shop-Vac, a privately held manufacturer of consumer products and industrial air-moving equipment. "And we had to do something because color consistency in your packaging reinforces your brand."

After launching a program that uses data supplied by color measurement instruments from X-Rite Inc., Shadle says he sees nothing but "Shop-Vac Red" when he returns to those same stores today.

In addition to improved quality, Shadle finds that he has more time for value-added tasks now that the color control program is underway. Instead of fielding up to seven complaints a week on color quality internally, Shadle said he may have to handle one color-matching issue a month.

Need for color consistency

During the past 50 years, Shop-Vac has established a reputation as the number-one brand of wet-dry vacuums in the world, with a specialty in the design and manufacture of consumer goods, such as shop vacuums and leaf blowers, and industrial vacuums and air moving equipment. The company has distribution and manufacturing facilities in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Shadle discovered that with a number of corrugators spanning four states, using perhaps a dozen ink suppliers with different formulations that, "there are a dozen different opinions on what PMS 186 red is."

To remove opinion from the process, he turned to X-Rite Inc., a leading designer and manufacturer of color measurement instruments and software. On the technical side of formulations and printing processes, he found help through BCM Inks-USA in Cincinnati.

"We contracted with BCM to help us with our color control program, and the first thing that they asked was: 'Do you have X-Rite?'" Shadle said. "I answered: 'No, we have some bright lights here and that's about the best way we have to judge color for packaging.'"

BCM, which formulates high-intensity, water-based flexographic inks for printing in the corrugated industry, recommended that Shop-Vac use an X-Rite spectrophotometer to develop exact standards that could be used throughout the supply chain. Shop-Vac decided on an X-Rite 939 spectro that is well suited for ink room and quality control applications and can be calibrated over the Internet using the company's NetProfilers 3 software.

"We had to take the guesswork out and let the machines do the work for us," Shadle recalled. "I told the vendors that I wasn't going to force them to purchase X-Rite or other color gauging equipment, but if they didn't have the equipment, it was going to be a crap shoot." A majority of the dozen vendors now have X-Rite or other color measurement equipment.

X-Rite representatives thoroughly demonstrated the equipment, passing along the names of customers that were using the instruments and software for similar applications.

"Shop-Vac provided us with color standards (plastic chips) from their actual product line," said Scott Miller, national sales and technical director for BCM. "These were the colors Shop-Vac ultimately wanted to produce on their packaging. We used the spectrophotometer to measure the samples, which provided us with colorimetric data used to develop print standards."

He said BCM and Shop-Vac then visited all of corrugated vendors to get samples of their packaging liners and assess the capabilities of the range of colors that each vendor could produce successfully, based upon variables such as anilox roll configurations. New print standards were generated based on the information gathered.

After they completed the survey, BCM and Shop-Vac set reasonable Delta E tolerances that they believed all the vendors could achieve. Miller said the survey indicated some of the colors printed were in the range of about a Delta E of 8, so they decided to start with a 3 Delta E to launch the initiative. A Delta E of 1 is considered the smallest value where an average observer can tell the difference between colors.

Miller said his company created MIF (Management Information Format) files for each new print standard. The electronic versions of the print standards were provided to each stakeholder in the supply chain. Once the new print standards were downloaded using X-Rite's equipment and software, all print providers were targeting the same color—a color that was clearly defined and achievable. In addition, all print standards were assigned unique company names, and BCM and Shop-Vac assembled color swatches and other reference materials into a color control binder that they gave to each corrugated vendor.

As the program runs now, vendors are asked to email to Shop-Vac their color measurement readings at the beginning, the middle, and the end of a press run. When a shipment of corrugated packaging comes in, Shop-Vac technicians pull random samples and take an average of five measurements per sample with the X-Rite spectrophotometer.

Having seen substantial progress with its initial tolerance target, Shop-Vac asked its corrugated vendors if they could achieve a value of 2 Delta E. "At first there was hesitation by some of our vendors, but surprisingly the corrugators that purchased the X-Rite equipment said they were completely amazed by the tools and said they would give it a try," he said. "Some of the vendors told me that they were able to pick up business because they told prospective customers that they were using X-Rite."

Shadle said it took about six months of experience and practice to get the program operational. Some corrugators asked to use up their inventories of old inks before purchasing new inks to meet the new requirements, and it took time for everyone to work through questions as they arose.

Shop-Vac is now looking to set standards of color management in its offset lithography and plastic poly bag printing. "Now that we have gotten the color so good on the corrugated, we are seeing the inconsistencies from vendor to vendor on the spot labels and accessory cards," Shadle reports. pP