Decorative Coatings - The colour they have or the colour you want?

There was a time when we all rushed how to watch a particular TV show on a particular station at a specified time. Time was suspended, we ate cold food and restaurants shut for the evening. To day its possible to watch what you want, when you want on whatever device you want.

So why is it still so hard to decorate your house with the exact colour you want, rather than the "Trend Colour" your favourite paint supplier wants to supply you?

Going back to Grandads day, when paint was protective rather than decorative, only a few colours were available. "British Museum Green", "Swedish Yellow" etc. The focus was on chemistry rather than colour.

As the world of colour evolved, colour TV, Colour Newspapers and well, everything colour, consumers started demanding more from their paint suppliers.

Typically, tastes may differ regionally, and even in one country like South Africa, coastal tastes may differ to inland preferences, so manufacturers were faced with a challenge.

Do you pre-manufacture thousands of colours in small volumes and store these around the country "Just in case", or a better idea, allow local outlets like Hardware Stores formulate the colour on demand from the consumer.

This lead to manufacturers shipping un-coloured '"Paint" to a Point of Sale" (POS) as well as smaller volumes of colour concentrate. As the concentrates were standardised, the POS also received a set of cardboard "Colour cards" or a current palette range, as well as a related fixed formulation to repeat the colour on the card.

This process has served us well for the past 30 years or so, but it has its limitations. Say a concentrate varies from batch to batch, what happens to the formula? Say you want a colour not catered for in the many cards. Say you don't have half a morning to sift through "Fifty shades of Gray" to find the correct colour. Say you and your interior decorator take forever to visualise the finished effect?

Like my Toyota Corolla, you tend to hand on to things that work well. Eventually however, new technology will eventually disrupt the "Status Quo" and this is now the case.

Enter the Portable Spectrophotometer.

Expanding on the existing process, a portable instrument is now reliable enough, and affordable enough to measure your colour, either at the POS outlet, or even in your home. (Yes you can match the exact colour to the wall just trashed by the furniture movers!).

• The procedure is: Measure your colour.
• Feed the data to your paint suppliers Central Data Base
• Create a formulation ON THE FLY
• Dispense the formulation to the quantity required
• pay the man and go home and paint.

Pie in the sky? On the 27th of March we demonstrated this process to one of the largest local manufacturers on THEIR equipment.

Ask us for more details here.

Controlling Colour Across Multiple Platforms

More and More Corporates are realizing the power of colour and images in the Global Economy. A picture is says a thousand words, and in these time drought days, in a second. A well known Corporate Logo instantly conveys a message that pages of text can not match. 

Research reveals the power of Branding even to the extent that say a leading Automotive Brand will be more trusted on a garment than a non branded garment, even if the brand has almost no history in garment sales.

A growing problem is the proliferation of Iconography and the trade mark registration of even the smallest of company's is necessary. If your trade mark is going to be displayed on multiple substrates and media, you soon run into a couple of colour control issues. From a trade mark point of view, one tip is to register your logo in black and white. It firstly protects the shape or design, and secondly you can specify any or many colours at a later stage without the fear of being rushed into a bad specification.

Colour is a sense and is not a property of the object, but the outcome of the context of viewing the object under known conditions. To provide a reproducible (In the real world) colour it must be described in an acceptable International Norm Colour Space like for instance CIE L*a*b.

If your Logo is going to be displayed in print, on plastic, on metal, card board, TV advertisements and back lit screens, a unique specification is required for each context.There also has to be an agreed tolerance of colour difference with your suppliers which ensures that if your branded truck is seen parked next to a bill board advertising your products, the viewer's sense of the colour is always the same. Confused colour messages hugely dilute the VALUE of the brand which is considered to be your most valuable intangible asset.


Typically, multiple suppliers will use multiple methods to create their customers colour work. From rough eye approved methods to sophisticated Spectrophotometer quality assurance will result in a varying palette of shades across the range. The suppliers are also potentially separated by large distances making Precise Colour Communication difficult.

Fortunately today sophisticated software is available to manage both the specification and control of colour, as well as the issue of multiple suppliers. This is available here and now.

#TheDress

Despite the brilliance of the human mind, and that sight is so natural for us, few know how colour perception actually works.

#TheDress is a good example.

Forgetting the technical niceties of how the eye works to gather spectral data and light, the mind decides what you "See". Eye witness evidence is easily contradicted if several eye witnesses to the same incident are questioned separately.

In short, the mind may or may not make use of the data supplied by the eyes when deciding the "Best" course of action at the time. Ask your wife next time she has her hair coloured, and you don't notice. The mind registers the "Wife" file and does not bother to update a "Known" object. Women may have better eye for detail, but su fer  rom the s ame pro lem.

(Did you fill in the gaps madam?)

Precise colour Communication is only possible with precise tools from suppliers like www.narich.co.za

A Light Conversation

More and more customers are asking for Colour and Spectroscopy solutions. many of these are already formed solutions available "Out of the Box" while even more require some conversation to configure and implement. As the choices grow, so doe dht need to chat with customers more often and more in depth. To this end, a dedicated Scientist can talk Spectroscopy, NIR can be discussed with an Industry Specialist, and Computer Colour matching can be implemented with a dedicated specialist trained in both the theory in Europe, and the production environment in Africa. Contact us for access to these services, or join our event on the 13th of August.

New Website, New Services from Narich (Pty) Ltd

After an explosive year of growth we have taken a short breather to radically improve our website with focussed product selection for the African market, dedicated service for technical support particularly with Spectramagic NX and Colibri support, as well as Spectroscopy. This has lead to a dedicated "Centre of Excellence" being established at Stellenbosch University under the CAF facility with expertise to help with most systems, focussing on NIR. We also have a Sasol RAMAN Resource for assistance.

We continue to close the circle for one stop shopping: Consultation, Sales Process, Installation, Implementation, Certification, Service & Support all via web based forms and help procedures.
have a new look at www.narich.co.za

Dear Customers, Colleagues, Principals, Suppliers and Partners, we wish you all a safe and sacred Holiday Season and look forward to being with you all again in 2014


Richard & Natalie Majewski and all of us at Narich (Pty) Ltd

How the senses affect taste perception

I came across this great article in FOOD PRODUCTION daily.com which is worth sharing, particularly with reference to our interest in colour. See the article here: Taste beyond flavour: How colour, texture and environment influence taste perception written by Caroline Scott-Thomas