Gimme a break....
Pantone is a specialty high end paint company - I've heard of them; never encountered the paint.Anyhow they are now graciously allowing their oh-so-exclusive palette of colours to be made available to the unwashed masses. Well, the unwashed masses who feel like spending $375 for a large color sample book, or a paltry $165 for your basic fan deck. (The kind available at just about every other paint store for between $10-20, free if you're a painting contractor, decorator or anyone else who might buy that brand.) I have a bag with about 15 fan decks from many paint companies and didn't spend a penny on any of them.
Anyhow, this is a bit too precious and snooty for my plebian taste! Probably a clever move - the press release went out everywhere and was reported locally - to garner the we really really want to be just like Martha Stewart and if it costs more it must be better crowd. I imagine high end decorators are going to snatch this up and start recommending Pantone paint instead of Benjamin Moore now.
I can't do the metric conversion in my head exactly but a rough guesstimate is about $150 for a gallon of their basic interior flat paint? Calling it "matte" instead of "flat" allows you to charge more I think. It's the same stuff.
The very best interior flat paint I buy - Graham ceramic flat; suitable for high traffic commercial use and scrubbable even in the flat finish - retails for a little over $50. My cost is about $37.00. It's not about cost, really - but at some point it just becomes a rip-off.
Reminds me of when Ralph Lauren first hit the market, selling for some ungodly amount of money. And it is CRAP paint. The store I used back in Denver who sold it had so many complaints about it they tried unsuccesfully to get out of their contract with RL. I think the formulas have been changed now, but do you know what the original RL paint was? Medium-grade Sherwin Williams paint, relabelled and jacked up.
Some people want so desperately to have the cachet they perceive in staged advertisements in House Beautiful, Vogue and the like. Clever marketing lets them think they get a piece of it by spending too much for consumer goods. Isn't that silly?
I don't care how good Pantone paint is - and I'm sure it's very nice stuff - it's not going to hold up, go on, wash or last three or four times better than other good paint. Once it's on the wall, nobody knows what brand it is!
posted by Carina @ 4:52 AM
8 Comments:
Oh, Pantone is branching out, is it?
Those color books are tools that designers have used for probably decades... and as a professional tool for working in color, they could get away with that kind of pricing.
For Joe and Jane Homeowner - Yeah, forget about it. The ones who'll go for this are the same ones that went for the RL rip-off.
holy shit..$50 for a gallon of paint? wow...really good paint is about $20 a gallon...i liked Platt & Lambert paint..but Payless Cashways had their store brand of Colony and it was a pretty damn good paint for most jobs..
damn..im surprised i even remember this stuff...was in the 80's the last time i messed with retail sales of paint..although i do my own jobs here around the house..i love the smell of paint...sigh*..
holy shit..$50 for a gallon of paint? wow...really good paint is about $20 a gallon...i liked Platt & Lambert paint..but Payless Cashways had their store brand of Colony and it was a pretty damn good paint for most jobs..
damn..im surprised i even remember this stuff...was in the 80's the last time i messed with retail sales of paint..although i do my own jobs here around the house..i love the smell of paint...sigh*..
Just painted two fiberglass pumpkins a pumpkin cream color which is the extent of my painting experiences.
btw, they turned out great and are proudly displayed in front of my garage! :-)
Yeah - I know the full size color books are a decorator staple and I can well understand that....but $165 for a standard color deck is plain silly!
~I can remember buying paint for $10 for a five....back when I was doing a lot of new homes (= crap paint) in the late 1980s.
Ah Karen so you are an early Halloween decorator! Someone in my 'hood has a giant house-sized spider web from ground to roofline on their house....looks pretty funny.
Carina~ I always (mentally) look at the last day of Sept. as the last day of summer. Put my fall decorations out the first day of Oct. through Thanksgiving.
Christmas is a couple days after Thanksgiving, if I get around to it, that way I can enjoy them longer.
{{that's my story and I'm stickin' to it}}
::giggle::
Do you mix your own colors? One of the reasons it is fun to paint furniture is that I mix the paint and get my own colors. You being a professional would probably be painting on such a large scale that you would have to purchase it already mixed. I usually pay about $30 to $40 a gallon.
Technobabe - actually, I used to do a lot of my own color mixing - well, tweaking at any rate - on the job. Carried a whole rack of Cal-tint tints. Nowadays most paint stores have that clever little color eye thingie, where a sample of whatever needs to be matched can be scanned by a computer, which spits out the formula for that color. So I just let the paint store do it!
A lot of the interior paint I use is in that price range even with my discount...for many jobs I use the very top of the line Graham paints.
You paint furniture? Must revisit your blog.
Karen - you are way ahead of me!
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