The doors to the church sanctuary open and the glowing bride enters, a vision of loveliness in her gorgeous wedding gown.
A soft gasp of admiration rises from the assembled guests. Gently resting her fingertips on her father\'s arm before he escorts her down the aisle, she pauses to take in the serenely beautiful scene: Her smiling groom at the altar. The lush flowers. The lilting music.
Soft candlelight plays across the radiant faces of her bridesmaids. Even the toes of the bridesmaids\' shoes, just barely visible from beneath the hems of their rose-petal-pink gowns, match the dresses exquisitely.
Everything is perfect:
This familiar scene repeats itself on average every 5 seconds in the United States where an estimated 2.4 million couples marry each year.
Thanks to Clariant\'s Archroma Global Services expert color-matching and color communication business, brides and others who buy special-occasion footwear and accessories through renowned bridal retailer David\'s Bridal have no worries when it comes to ensuring the shoe and purse colors perfectly match their dresses.
It\'s one less headache for brides and those who help them plan their weddings.
David\'s Bridal - the largest bridal retailer in America - began working with the Charlotte, N.C. based Archroma team in 2004 in an effort to achieve consistent results when shoes and handbags were being dyed at different David\'s Bridal stores across the country for members of the same wedding party.
Previously David\'s Bridal stores had received shoe dyes from one of the chain\'s footwear manufacturers. The dye lots themselves were proving inconsistent and there was no way to accurately account for different lighting conditions such as the store versus outside versus ceremony or to show the prospective bride an accurate representation of the finished shoe color relative to the dress.
Without a systematized reliable color prediction and color standardization method, that Peridot-colored shoe in Poughkeepsie might look more like Celery or even Citrus Green, depending on which store did the dyeing.
Bradley Kapcar, David\'s Bridal vice president for merchandising of accessories and footwear, says the Archroma solution - bottled dyes, selling tools and technical support -proved to be just the right formula for happy brides and well-coordinated ensembles on what is one of the most important days of a woman\'s life.
\"We are now able to provide a better color match to fabrics under almost any light conditions in more than 100 shades of custom dyes for shoes and purses in our lines,\" says Kapcar. His company introduces from 3 to 5 new fashion colors for shoes and purses in each of two \"seasons\" a year.
And each of those colors must be available to David\'s Bridal stores located in communities from Anchorage, Alaska, to Phoenix, Ariz, to Orlando, Fla., to Portland, Maine, and everywhere in between.
The dyes are produced at Clariant\'splant at Martin, S.C., repackaged into small six-packs of individual bottles - all keyed to engineered standards that precisely and numerically identify that color as a fixed point in \"color space\" - and then shipped on request to more than 280 David\'s Bridal locations across the United States.
The whole process is further supported by a recent project to automate ordering and fulfillment over the SAP enterprisewide resource planning system of Clariant.
These technical advances plus the consistency of the colors achievable using the combination of Clariant dyes backed by Archroma\'s engineered color standards and in-store tools that let brides see swatches of the actual dyed shoe and purse fabrics are important, Kapcar says.
\"Although a handful of colors remain constant, such as black, red and wine, brides adopt fashion colors for their wedding party more quickly than even a few years ago.
Our product development and design teams research the latest colors from around the world to ensure our brides get the hottest colors and styles, fresh off the runway and ready to make an entrance at any event,\" he says. Some of the latest color trends, he notes, include Canary Yellow, Clover Green and Watermelon.
Kapcar says his company plans to move forward working with Archroma to improve in-store swatch books and other materials to give them an added degree of sophistication and style.
Clariant
(Jun12,2008)
