Keeping Momzilla at Bay with Color Measurement

Posted on | January 18, 2011 | 1 Comment

The most demanding customer of color matching may not be an automaker or paint manufacturer, but the mother of a bride who is inspecting the table settings at a wedding reception — or worse, the bride’s new mother-in-law.

And when rows of tables draped with teal tablecloths are lined up in a well-lighted setting, even the groom may take notice when the colors aren’t in sync. To make sure such affairs come off with only the one intended hitch, the nation’s second largest renter of linens, fine china and equipment for weddings and special events is using a battery of spectrophotometers from X-Rite Inc. to tell them when tablecloths are good to go.

It may not be a problem for someone with a good eye for color to pick out matching tablecloths from a small stack of linens, but the task grows unwieldy when anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 tablecloths a day in a variety of colors need to be laundered and categorized the way Party Rental Ltd. does. With more than a dozen showrooms and three warehouses servicing New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Philadelphia, Maryland, Washington, DC and Virginia, Party Rental Ltd. consolidates all laundering at its main 250,000-square-foot warehouse in Teterboro, N.J.

“The majority of our customers are high-end caterers and event planners who are coordinating high-profile events — weddings, galas, non-profit fundraisers,” says Jack Holden, Director of Software Development for Party Rental Ltd., based in Teterboro, N.J. ” When they order a dozen navy blue tablecloths, they don’t want to end up with a dozen shades of navy blue.

“The number of dye lot issues for our solid colors has dropped dramatically since we’ve started using the instruments. And that’s a huge deal.”

Party Rental Ltd. launders its tablecloths after every use, and the linens fade over time. To make sure they stay in specification, the company has developed a pretty sophisticated system over the past year that identifies the outliers on solid colors.

Each tablecloth bears an RFID chip that is first read to identify that particular linen, and then the color is measured by a VeriColor 410 spectrophotometer that feeds its data into computers that maintain cloth histories and tolerances.

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