Milliken’s ‘ColorDirection 2020’ explores the colors of the human journey

The theme of Connected Comfort serves as a foundation for the six color tones selected for ColorDirection 2020 — reflecting the convenience, flexibility and personal experiences capturing the connection color creates between products from various markets and the consumers they serve.
As humans, we experience the world through our senses. From our earliest childhood, life-long memories and enduring habits are formed through how we associate these formative experiences with feelings, tastes, colors and overall aesthetics. Milliken profoundly understands the power of color in triggering emotion and defining consumer behavior.

Capturing the mood of consumers through effective branding and personalization, as well as understanding how they interact with, and experience, color is an essential marketing exercise for brands and product designers.

The Milliken ColorDirection 2020 report has carefully curated a palette of six new colors aimed at distilling this highly sought-after differentiation potential in product design. The Connected Comfort selection sets out to understand and encapsulate the modern consumer’s journey through color associations. These trending colors are:

• Terra Mundo: A color inspiring a journey home, to a place we understand. Galvanized by the raw materials of earth, the richness of a warm soothing sunset, the brightness of spices and the darkness of teas.
• FirstLove: A color of self-care infused with a sweet shade characterized by hints of pink — which we associate with our softer side. Before we learn to love another, we first need to love ourselves.
• Purple Dreaming: This color, long associated with royalty and riches, is one of imagination and the realization of our goals. It brings to the Connected Comfort Collection a distinctive strength that is unmistakably individual.
• Planet Green: We find truth in forest silence, standing in awe at nature’s effortless achievements. This color brings a deep satisfaction, and a sense of belonging to something bigger, fitting perfectly into place.
• Relaxing Blue: This color brings a quiet authority, fresh awareness, and readiness. It evokes a journey’s end and a reward of recharging, signaling rest and calm. After the exertion of a busy day with work or family, comes the long exhale of a job well done.
• Green Dawn: Simply, a fresh start with the promise of a bright new day. This color sees only this moment, bursting with energy and possibilities, enthusiasm and positivity, embracing the opportunities of another beautiful day on earth.

In the busy world in which we live, shoppers look for convenience, transparency and efficiency. They also want to quickly grab the go-to products they like on the shelf. This is where differentiation, branding and personalization play crucial roles in a competitive market place.

The Connected Comfort palette, represented by the above six trend colors for 2020, provides a design and marketing roadmap into the sometimes elusive consumer journey.

The combination of transparent packaging and brightly colored content for home, personal hygiene and laundry-care products allows brand owners to tap into megatrends shaping the consumer products space.

Liquitint™

Milliken, through its Liquitint colorants, is a global leader in providing brands with the right tools to address these trends and perpetually evolving color needs.

Through its 12 basic colorants, powerful colors and outstanding processability can be achieved with Liquitint polymeric colorants.

Among the many reasons top manufacturers opt for Milliken’s cutting-edge Liquitint colorants are: solubility, compatibility, versatility and stability. Its highly-stable colorants’ water-soluble and non-staining properties means they can be easily blended and washed out. They can also seamlessly integrate with the most challenging ingredients, like perfume.

Liquitint™ Agro

This range of non-staining liquid colorants represents a major breakthrough to support the use of color within the agricultural sector. Developed by Milliken, Liquitint Agro colorants are literally in a class of their own as the technology is neither a traditional pigment nor dye. Instead, it is a unique liquid colorant technology which exhibits non-staining characteristics. It offers many interesting benefits for fertilizer manufacturers and their customers.

ClearTint™

Color is a very powerful marketing tool. Consumers recognize the enhanced branding and differentiation which vibrant colors attribute to their favorite products. Milliken’s ClearTint colorants for transparent polypropylene, clarified with Millad^® NX™ 8000, combine the attractiveness of clarity with the superior aesthetics of non-nucleating polymeric colorants.

ClearTint is not a pigment or a dye; so colors do not bleed of from the clarified PP – making it compliant with safety requirements for food packaging.

Reactint^®

Producers of polyurethane (PU) foams can achieve deeper shades and improve product branding with Milliken’s Reactint colorants. Unlike traditional PU coloring techniques which require a large inventory of color references and tanks, Reactint offers pure liquid processing from only 5 primary colors – reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

Reactint polymeric colorants are specifically designed for coloring polyurethane and other thermoset resins. Producing PU in virtually any shade has never been easier.

Keyplast^®

Keyplast colorants, used in plastics by masterbatch producers, compounders and resin producers offer a vast spectrum of stable and reproducible colors suitable for use with a wide range of resins.

The multitude of applications which Keyplast colorants are effectively used in food contact applications, toys, high heat technical applications and the polymers include: PET, PBT, polycarbonate, polystyrene and different types of polyamides.

Keep your brand ahead of the consumer market curve with Milliken’s suite of products: ClearTint, Reactint, Liquitint and Keyplast colorants.

Learn more on chemical.milliken.com.