INITIAL - COLOR DEVELOPMENT ANALYSIS

Marketing Planning

Initial’s colors and moods are its selling points.

The brand sees fashion as a lifestyle and attitude of life, considering all it’s providing to customers as a whole, including fashion, store interior and atmosphere, customer service and promotion.

Color theme is applied to all these aspects, building a consistent style, thus become the brand’s competitive edge to impress its customers.It is like a whole package to wrap customer’s mind, initial projects a consistent image to its audiences.


Color Development analysis

Key colors of initial: Brown, beige, white (monochromatic, low chroma)

Color related to emotion

Brown: casualness, warmth, tranquility, naturalness, friendliness, humility, earthiness
Beige: classic, neutral, soft, warm, bland
White: purity, innocence, cleanliness, spiritualism, enlightenment

Earth tone is widely used in initial garments.





The earth tone colors are very close to nature.


Color theories applied

Principle of Familiarity

- familiarity is pleasing and readily accepted
- color schemes based on nature will seem harmonious and comfortable to most people
- get used to look at these colors
- no artificial color is used

e.g. brown, beige, deep blue of sea, deep green of mountain


Principle of Resemblance

- light and dark colors of the same hue, or colors from an analogous color scheme
- colors harmonize more when the differences between them are less


Brand Color Development VS Brand Image

Close to nature

Initial’s brand philosophy is promoting relaxation, asking customers to get away from the busy daily life and explore new insights from the nature. Initial believe that life is to enjoy and the nature is the origin of life.

Nature colors are cleverly used in initial’s fashion to achieve principle of familiarity, showing harmonious charm.


Theme emphasis

Color combination is a tool helps presenting seasonal theme.

Specific colors are assigned to be the key colors for each season according to its corresponding theme. These colors are introduced to the host earth tone combination in order to add novelty to the color selection.

Seasonal theme is highlighted in initial fashion and easily stand out by the use of colors.


Color selection

Initial color selection for every season is also affected by the global trend.
For example, for F/W 2008, purple became the hottest color worldwide. At the same time, purple was also chosen to be the theme color of initial menswear F/W 2008.

Initial chose its purple color in line with the brand’s mood and degree of tint and hues. And this trendy color is then applied on garments in correct proportion.


Adopting minimalism

Initial adopts minimalism as a tool to build up the brand image and help the customers back to originality. It uses clean and simple lines, natural colors, interesting textures to combine simple elegance and functionality to a timeless form .

Initial also use color brightness balance and contrast between surface colors to improve visual aesthetics in order to let customers feel comfortable and relaxed in shops.


Customer targeting

Initial targets at mid-class young men and women who seek for quality and unique attitude of life. They are tired with their usual busy life, numbed by nowadays materialism, longing for a simple moment of peace. Thus, atmosphere of initial can serve as a resort for them to relax.

The brand’s host colors are brown, beige and white, give people classic yet casual style. It is very clever for initial to make use of the feeling of colors, with the coordination store interior and atmosphere, to create a harmonious image to impress its target customers.


Conclusions

Brand color development takes an important role on building initial images and present the theme of a particular season, thus to a certain extent, determine the brand’s success.

Initial color formula:
Earth tone + theme colors of the season

Usually, special tertiary colors are chosen to be theme colors.


The Hong Kong busy life culture is the key of success for initial.

It helps projecting initial’s relaxation philosophy, which customers find resonance. The harmonious color combination and attitude of life make the brand very favorable among Hong Kong consumers.

The brand’s concept also helps to shape behaviors of customers by changing their value judgments. Simple and harmonious colors of garments and shop interiors are introduced to fulfill metropolitan’s desire for peace.