Colorfin

Remember the days? Cracking open a fresh box of sixty-four colors (cornflower! burnt sienna!) and unleashing an early series of prismatic stick figures, race cars and flower patches worthy of the finest refrigerator gallery?

Now imagine the thrill of working in an actual color laboratory, literally, an operation that concocts, formulates and reinvents, well, color itself. Meet Ladd Forsline and Berni Ward, partners in art (and marriage) at Colorfin. To their Kutztown company they bring over thirty-five years of combined experience in the art supply world and know more than a thing or two about how artists like to work.

Forsline graduated from the prestigious MFA program at the Yale School of Art in 1988, and went on to found Forsline & Starr Ltd, the company behind such inventions as Colour Shaper® and OilBar®–now standard tools & materials in the best studios worldwide. Armed with an international business degree from the National University of Ireland in Galway, Berni spent her career on the other side of the palette working in marketing and business development for everything from cosmetics to consumer goods to art and design supplies. Together? “We know the psychology of art,” finds Forsline, “how artists buy, what they need.” In fact, their skill sets are like opposite sides of a color wheel: a perfect complement. He knows the packaging, she knows how it should look on shelves. He concocts the color formulas, while she hobnobs with retailers.

Here’s what’s cool about Colorfin, and what’s made it such a cult favorite with artisans of all strokes, from museum-worthy painters to spare-bedroom crafters: it takes bestsellers and makes them even better.

Take PanPastel. The pastels that forever came in a stick format (think a creamier, more pungent crayon), Colorfin thought was time to unwrap, pulverize and put in a pot. Eighty pots, to be exact. Now artists could easily lift (with an artist’s knife), apply and control pastel color like paint. Genius!

Perhaps best of all, PanPastel “eliminates the need to invest in hundreds of colors for a complete pastel painting palette,” notes Forsline.

Another Colorfin original is , their Sofft tool line. Sofft Covers are spongy little triangles that slip over the ends of hard-edged art tools and transform them into absorbent ones, capable of carrying and releasing color and material in a unique way. These and other spongy offering provide infinite possibilities for artists to shade, blend, layer and more.

All in all, it took Colorfin five years to grow from concept to market. Forsline and Ward approached the Small Business Development Center near Kutztown University for invaluable guidance in writing their business plan. A Market Access Grant helped them approach new export markets by funding overseas trade shows, the gold star for marketing vibrant and tangible products like PanPastels. This grant also helped Colorfin develop literature in other languages to more thoroughly penetrate the international market. Plus, working in a Pennsylvania university town means Keystone Innovation Zone eligibility, a grant that offered Colorfin funding to secure their intellectual property.

Aside from financial incentives, Forsline and Ward find Kutztown “the perfect place for a small manufacturer that changes on a dime”. In other words, just close enough to the fast-paced Eastern corridor, its big airports and inspiring possibilities, without the hampering logistics and costs that go with it.

From their humble college-town digs, Colorfin sells in almost five hundred retail stores and online retailers like Dick Blick and Amazon, and distributes through eighteen countries, soon adding Japan, Sweden and Germany to the Colorfin family. Now that’s spreading the revolution way outside the lines.