As a designer and manufacturer of boutique wooden furniture, Gunlocke Co., can provide differentiated solutions for private offices of different objects (executives and professionals), and the important color matching is the company's top priority.
To improve color consistency and the speed with which new colors can be matched, the Wayland, New York-based company began dyeing its products in-house last year. They did so using X-Rite equipment and software.
X-Rite already provides color matching equipment for the Gunlocke manufacturing process. Therefore, as the world's best color management solution provider, it can make full use of its own resources and establish a system to provide color schemes that meet customer requirements conveniently and quickly.
Justin Laird, Color Scientist at the Gunlocke Stain Mixing Lab, said, "By using solutions from X-Rite, our color lab technicians are now able to formulate colors that have never been formulated or seen before. "In the dyeing lab, we can formulate colors that have never been seen before and have them in production within an hour," Laird said. "We felt the system was too simple and powerful," he said.
X-Rite's Colori7 system also saved Gunlocke's color lab time. The laboratory receives various color customization requests from customers every day. The lab needs to be running a minimum of 5 days a week. Laird said: "Compared to letting other companies match colors before, this powerful system has greatly improved the stability of color matching, which allows us to formulate our own colors and greatly improves the flexibility of our work."
Gunlocke is an operating company of HNI Group, the world's second largest furniture maker, headquartered in Muscatine, Iowa. Gunlocke has gained a solid reputation over the past 110 years as a furniture designer and manufacturer of premium office furniture for high-end clients. Gunlocke also provides seating for the Oval Office of the President of the United States. Beginning with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the office seats of eight consecutive U.S. presidents have been provided by the company. Gunlocke's Wayland plant employs 750 people and produces office furniture sold worldwide.
Laird said that color is one of the most important factors in Gunlocke products. It's his job to make sure that all the chairs, tables, and storage units Gunlocke manufactures are in the same color, especially for those customers who have specific color requirements.
"Color determines to a large extent how customers perceive our final product," he said. "The accuracy of color can help us really win over dealers and customers. It will reduce a lot of trouble. In this way, we can spend more time developing new processes, new products and new technologies, which can not only improve production efficiency but also improve product quality.”
Gunlocke uses X-Rite SP64 Spectrophotometer to detect raw materials during the production process, to ensure the color accuracy of the production process, and to check the color of the finished product. When preparing dyeing, the company uses X-Rite Colori7 desktop Spectrophotometer to measure the color of the sample and transfer the color to ColoriMatch software for color matching. The software can be used for opaque, translucent and transparent color matching.
Color schemes can be automatically saved to the software's database. When customers order Gunlocke products again, the consistency and stability of product colors can be ensured.
"If a customer wants to add to an existing order, or needs to be consistent with a color they've been using for years, we need to redo the color scheme for them and produce the order in accordance with their custom color requirements," Laird said. "The system provides us with a systematic solution to preserve existing data".
“Customers have requirements for color accuracy and stability,” Laird said, “and X-Rite has provided us with the equipment, software and people to support them.
