Out of the Blue Box Co., Ltd. in Thailand is an advanced heat transfer manufacturer for many well-known brands including Adidas, Reebok and Mizuno. They focus on product quality and innovations to meet their customers’ needs in the fast-moving fashion and apparel market.
They were frustrated with the difficulties they experienced in their coloration processes, such as metamerism issues and color matching methods. They had heard about the natific Color Certification program from one of their customers and thought that it would be a great opportunity to become more confident in their color capabilities.
So, in 2016, Out of the Blue Box became Color Certified through natific.
Metamerism is a big issue in the textile and dyeing industry. It’s when two items appear to have the same color under one light source, but show a different shade under another light source.
Let’s speak to the mill and find out how the natific Brand Color Certification made them more color confident.
natific: What did you do to ensure continuous improvements at your mill before your Color Certification?
Out of the Blue Box: Our color knowledge came from our customers, and we had some third party color experts that trained us. Still, the color issues remained very difficult to resolve. To really improve our coloring capability, our experience showed that natific was the best option. From what natific showed us we can now help ourselves to improve day by day.
natific: What was your big a-ha moment when you started with the Certification?
Out of the Blue Box: The color matching method! For example, we may come up with the right color by mixing 2-3 colors instead of the ready color that is available from the supplier.
This gives us greater flexibility and we can more frequently make closer color matches to the customers chosen shades, meeting their quality requirements. This is often faster too with more right-first-time. We also have the opportunity to evaluate recipes for cost efficiencies.
“If you really want to improve your coloring
capability, natific is your best option.”
Out of the Blue Box Co., Ltd.
natific: Would you like to share an example of how and why you are more color confident now?
Out of the Blue Box: From a management point of view, before natific, my team was not confident about how to comment on color matching. Thanks to the training with natific, we are now much more clear on what is right and wrong.
Our knowledge about color theory is much deeper and we are more confident in our color checking because each person has the same training and uses a standardized method of evaluation.
This gives great benefits to the company as a whole because it makes our team and our customers more confident.
natific: What do you see as the biggest advantages and accomplishments with the Color Certification?
Out of the Blue Box: We have achieved much greater confidence in ourselves and also greater confidence in us from our customers. We can save 1-2 days in the development of some colors because we now have better knowledge on how to develop good color match recipes.
natific: What was your favorite feature of the Certification?
Out of the Blue Box: The training after their testing. natific provided us with clear explanations and gave us a lot of tips and guidance; we understand coloration for brands much better now.
natific: Thank you for taking the time sharing your experience with us!
Out of the Blue Box: Thank you!