Brands may not have a line item in their budget for color, but it can impact the bottom line in different ways. Understanding the true cost of color can help accelerate go-to-market, reduce waste, and save thousands.
Color plays a big role in purchase decisions when you consider it only takes shoppers 2 to 7 seconds to select an item from the shelf. To stand out, brands must introduce interesting designs to launch new varieties and seasonal specials, while considering the impact new packaging will have on brand recognition and sustainability goals.
In all this hustle to reinvent packaging, the cost of color for these new designs often gets overlooked.
Understanding Color Costs
Consider a scenario where a beverage company wants to introduce cardboard packaging for a new 4 pack of soda. The design team selects colors, anticipating a seamless transition from concept to reality. However, colors that dazzle on the white labels will appear muddy and dull on brown kraft. That’s because material and print process have a significant visual impact on final appearance.
In a conventional print packaging workflow, the only way to know how a color will look in production is to create a proof on each substrate. One brand estimated this process costs over $285, per color, including the time to request the drawdown, creating the drawdown, evaluating samples, shipping samples, and final review by the brand.
Despite the seemingly modest expense, the cumulative impact can be significant. With lead times, a typical design cycle can take about 30 days, often repeating two or three times before a new color is approved. Multiply that by the number of new and updated designs each year, and color can easily cost a big consumer packaging goods brand hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.
Design with Achievable Color
Addressing this challenge is PantoneLIVE, a digital color library suite for the specification and communication of Pantone standards and private brand colors across the packaging supply chain.
PantoneLIVE gives design and prepress teams digital access to over 84,000 Pantone Colors for top packaging and print applications without having to search through color books. For custom colors, brands can use Private Library Manager to create and securely share the spectral definitions for private brand colors or engineered colors within the PantoneLIVE ecosystem.
With one cloud platform to access all your digital colors, brands can accelerate the design process and shorten the design cycle time in half while ensuring color accuracy across packaging substrates, inks, and print processes.
How PantoneLIVE Works
Using the PantoneLIVE Design software and the included plug-in for Adobe Illustrator, designers can drop brand colors into their packaging designs to visualize how they will reproduce on specific substrates, print processes, inks, and application methods. Designers can then select colors that are achievable across all desired substrates and get to approved color faster. The colors and their spectral values can be digitally shared across the production chain to ensure brand integrity across production processes, departments, suppliers, and geographies.
The Value of PantoneLIVE
While setting up PantoneLIVE with a large brand, the design manager needed to know how the Pantone Color would reproduce as a vignette on flexo film with a white ink backer. Bypassing the traditional route of ordering drawdowns or proofs from the supplier, we pulled up the PantoneLIVE Visualizer app. The color was selected from the PantoneLIVE library for that same packaging scenario.
A quick search for the color revealed the information for different packaging scenarios. Clicking the “Color Info” button, the manager looked up the tint ramp and saw how the color shifts to gray as it runs down the ramp from 100% to 0%. In less than a minute, the manager had the answer and can share it with the design team. No more waiting days for the answer and incurring added costs to the budget.
Digital Workflows Eliminate Hidden Costs
Moving to a digital workflow and incorporating a proven solution like PantoneLIVE into a packaging design process helps eliminate the hidden costs of color while improving time to market. Not to mention, it’s a more sustainable process that lowers your carbon footprint by eliminating the printing and shipping of proofs.
It’s a simple process change that is a win/win for all stakeholders. Designers are happier and more productive. Print suppliers avoid the frustration of multiple rounds of proofs and press checks.
Want to Learn More?
Download our Cost of a Brand Color in CPG Packaging Whitepaper.
If you’d like to speak with a Brand Color Expert about your specific needs, fill out the form on the right.
