These Two Companies Are Changing The Way Consumers Think About Paint

Source: Architectural Digest, Ronda Kaysen
Photo: Paint supplies from Clare arrive directly at customers’ doors. (Courtesy of the Manufacturer)

Meet two new start-ups that are shaking up the multi-billion-dollar paint market

For the average homeowner, few shopping experiences are as confusing and unglamorous as choosing house paint. Hours are undoubtedly wasted at a hardware store staring at a wall of tiny paper swatches to narrow a pool of 500 shades of white down to five. Soon, the living room wall is slathered in little patches of color to figure out how White Dove is any different from White Linen.

But that bewildering experience may be changing. In 2018, two online paint companies, Clare and Backdrop, entered the market, aiming to shake it up like, well, a can of paint.

Rather than sort through thousands of colors, customers select from a curated collection of around 50, and order them online for just under $50 a gallon. Want purple? Clare offers three. Looking for white? Backdrop has five. The sampling process has been stripped down, too. Peel and stick samples arrive by mail—no more little cans of paint. Instead, simply affix a $2 removable sticker to the wall and move it around the room.

“The paint industry has been ripe for disruption for a while because I think that choosing paint colors and finishes and finding the right supplies can be intimidating for the everyday person,” says Justina Blakeney, a designer and the founder of the hit blog Jungalow. “These companies may be taking some of the intimidation out of the process.”

Indeed, Natalie and Caleb Ebel, the wife and husband team who founded Backdrop, started the company after struggling to decide how to paint their baby’s nursery. The couple would walk past a nondescript hardware store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and see their neighbors inside, also sifting endlessly through paint swatches. “There were people standing in front of that color wall with 3,000 colors, literally pulling their hair out,” Caleb Ebel, who previously worked for eyewear company Warby Parker, says. “We started thinking, ‘There has got to be a better way for this.’”

Like Warby Parker, Clare and Backdrop are following a path forged by similar direct-to-consumer brands that have upended long-held standards about how to sell products. And in the $31.5 billion U.S. paint market—with Americans projected to buy 1.4 billion gallons of paint this year—that means big business.

Clare and Backdrop “are smack in the middle of the playbook for direct brands,” says Randall Rothenberg, the chief executive officer of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association. These new companies “all follow the same practices, they all adhere to the same principals, and they all derive from the same economic and industrial lens.”

But Clare and Backdrop do more than encourage armchair shopping. They also simplify a dizzying process for people who do not have a professional designer at their side.

Clare, whose founder, Nicole Gibbons, is an interior designer and design blogger, plays the role of virtual color consultant. As a designer, Gibbons would make color recommendations that clients would readily accept. They did not spend weeks waffling between various shades of green. “My clients never doubted us,” Gibbons says. “If I recommended a color to my client, they never once said, ‘Go back and bring me 10 more.’”

Gibbons sought to bring that authority to a paint company. The website offers a quiz that asks questions about a room’s light, size, style, and furnishings and then suggests colors with whimsical names like Avocado Toast and Dirty Martini. Gibbons selected the Clare color palette by considering color families and how color may be used in a home, choosing ones that have a universal appeal and avoiding any with complex undertones. The goal is to offer smart advice that a consumer would trust.

For now, both Clare and Backdrop are targeting the do-it-yourself house painter, rather than professional designers who already have longstanding relationships with established paint companies like Farrow & Ball. Designers may not be using Backdrop or Clare yet, but they liken the potential impact of these new companies to the way HGTV brought professional interior design advice into the homes of people who’d never hire a professional. “It democratizes design in a positive, healthy way,” said Breeze Giannasio, a Los Angeles interior designer. “It’s giving services to people who would have never hired an interior designer in the first place.”

There’s also the “it” factor. Colors like Backdrop’s Self Portrait, a deep, dark red, offer consumers the promise that an Instagram-ready room is possible without the help of a social media influencer. “They are savvy to that. Especially Backdrop,” said Erin Williamson, a designer in Austin. “Everybody is looking for the color that is going to get Instagrammed and searched and pop.”

Andrea Schumacher, an interior designer in Denver, sees the potential for designer partnerships with a signature color line marketed through a company like Clare or Backdrop. Fans of a decorator’s style could theoretically choose from an assortment of preselected colors that mirror that designer’s sensibility. Although neither Backdrop nor Clare have such partnerships at the moment, both companies plan to expand their palettes.

Industry veterans may also need to change their game. If nimble online competitors peel away even a small fraction of their traditional customers, the effects could be significant for companies like Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore. “In slow-growth categories, that’s devastating,” Rothenberg says.

But such companies have indicated a willingness to adapt. “Now people want things when they want them, where they want them, how they want them,” Dan Calkins, Benjamin Moore’s newly named chief executive officer, said in a recent interview with AD PRO. “We have to stay ahead of that to ensure that we are part of the future.”

That future, it seems, may be one where the color wheel is smaller, but—for designers and consumers alike— somehow brighter.

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/clare-backdrop-new-paint-companies