Shop by Color

When I started Shop Sweet Lulu, I worked out of my home office.  I remember the Expedit bookshelves from Ikea that stored my entire range of products, along with a few rubbermaid bins and a flat-file cabinet.  Back then, naming product colors was easy - most of them were already named by their manufacturer, so it was convenient to use those.

As my product line expanded, I would occasionally run into problems - say a new pink product wasn't really the same pink as the others, well then I gave it a fun new name.  I've always had a 'shop by color' feature on the site, but fast forward a few years and a couple thousand products, and we were up to 29 shades of pink.  29 SHADES OF PINK!

I believe that we owe it to our customers to give them the best description possible - I know that you can't walk into my store, pick up a product, and see how it compares to something else on the shelf.  And for that reason, several months ago, we embarked on revisiting every one of our 2000+ products to make sure that products given the same color name matched as best as possible.

This was not an easy process.  We went through product categories by color, and looked at each single product, determining if it was best to keep its given name or renamed something entirely different - we want everything named "caribbean blue," for example, to match anything else in the store with that same color name.  This involved innumerable consultations with all of the Lulus gathered around the table - "Would you say this is more of a party pink or a lipgloss pink?"  My husband would inevitably throw his arms in the air and walk away.

We took a representative sample of each color and matched it to the closest Pantone swatch we could find, and renamed each color in that group.   We then used the Pantone colors to create digital swatches of color for the website.

Is our system foolproof?  No way.  Every time a new shipment of products arrives, we deal with a new twist - sometimes (often, actually) the dye lot has changed.  Many times, different products by the same manufacturer are slightly different colors.

Will the colors be an exact Pantone match?  No.  What we've done is group items with their closest-matching counterparts.  We looked at each product and said "would I want these products on the same table at my own party?"  If the answer was 'yes' then they were named accordingly.

Sometimes, product colors are printed right on the packaging of the product itself.  But what one manufacturer may call "aqua" another may call "pool" - so in cases like that, we added the product to a color category, but did not rename its given color.

Unfortunately, the old "the color on your screen will vary by monitor and resolution" disclaimer still holds true.  Sorry, friends - there's just nothing we can do about that one.   We tried to make it as easy as we could, while still offering as many pretty products as possible.

Here's what our 'pink' category looks like now (we're down to "JUST" 12 shades!)

Have you ever used our "Shop by Color" feature?  We'd love for you to try it out!  And to encourage you to do so, we're offering 15% off your purchase through the end of September, using the following discount code: COLORMEPRETTY (expires 9/30/2013 at midnight CST - not valid on previous purchases - excludes tax and shipping).

What color will you choose?

xx
Jessie