Plenty of people have personalized license plates and stationery, but few — actually only two — have a color all to themselves.
In 2011, Sherry Chris, a CEO of a realty company who lives in Tribeca, hired Pantone, the color developer based in Carlstadt, NJ, to create a custom pink for her.
Pantone had previously collaborated with Chris on a project for her business, Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate in Madison, NJ, and the color company’s technical director, Carmine Matarazzo, suggested she consider getting a hue just for herself.
“I just love pink: I wear it every day. It’s such a happy, vibrant color,” explains Chris. But she admits she was initially skeptical of spending the cash for her own shade. Neither she nor Pantone will provide an exact figure, but Pantone will say the process typically costs tens of thousands of dollars. Many brands and companies do it — Barbie and the US Army have their own colors — but Chris and music mogul Jay Z, who hired Pantone to create “Jay-Z blue” in 2007, are the only people to have a color all to themselves.
“I wasn’t surprised that [Jay Z] wanted us to create a shade of blue,” says Pantone Color Institute VP Laurie Pressman, who heads the custom-color arm of the business. “Blue Ivy. ‘The Blueprint’ albums. Obviously, it’s a color that’s close to his heart.”
At first, Chris says she was doubtful that she had the same chromatic needs as the hip hop legend.
“I thought, ‘What would I do with my own color? I’m not Jay Z,’ ” she says. “But then I thought, well, it could be interesting!”
Chris has found plenty do with Sherry Chris Pink — a k a SC 2011.
“The first thing I did when I got it was [get] business cards and stationery with the color on it,” she says. She also had a chair done in the color, and created a Foursquare check-in and hashtag for the piece called #thepinkchair.
The custom color process typically begins with a client bringing in a textile or object to Pantone to work from. Chris offered up a favorite scarf.
“Jay Z brought in a piece of his old motorcycle,” recalls Matarazzo, who has been creating the company’s tailor-made tones for almost three decades. “One of the more interesting requests I got was from Maui Jim, the sunglass company. They brought in a multicolored feather. I thought, ‘How are we going to do this?’ ”
In the case of the feather, it took Matarazzo, a trained chemist, and his team of eight technicians several weeks to nail the kind of iridescent, shimmering blue the brand had been trying to capture. “It took a lot of guesswork. And science,” he says.
One of the most well-known colors Pantone has worked on is Tiffany’s famous turquoise. The jeweler first adopted its signature robin’s-egg blue in 1845, with the launch of its first Blue Book, a yearly catalog of the brand’s most exclusive jewels. But in 2001, the company began to notice that the color had taken on a more greenish tone, and so it approached Pantone to see if they could fix it — and create a formula that all its printers and vendors could use to get a consistent hue. A new documentary, “Crazy About Tiffany’s,” out Feb. 19 in select theaters and video-on-demand, delves into the color’s history.
At the end of the process, Pantone delivers clients a heap of swatches (used for matching when printing materials), a unique Pantone formula for the shade and CMYK values (numbers that refer to how much cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks would be required to reproduce a color on a printing press). Chris says she got some bragging rights with her pink swatches.
“If I’m with people in the design world and fashion world, I’ll just throw out there, ‘I have my own Pantone color.’ Just me and Jay Z,” she says. “That’s pretty cool!”