By Michael F. Carmichael
Oct. 20, 2011
Next time you’re in your car take a look around. Everything look OK? Nothing out of place or bothering you about the way the dashboard, the door panels, the visors, the steering column and all the other stuff that goes in there looks?
Good. You can probably thank Uniform Color Co. for that.
| Sara Esser, business unit manager of Uniform Color Company. |
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Sara Esser is one of two business unit managers who oversee the various divisions of the 30-year-old company that’s based in Holland, Mich., but has facilities and relationships around the globe. She has a degree in chemical engineering in addition to an MBA and started with the company as a process engineer, progressing to managing a plant in Massachusetts before assuming her current responsibilities.
Uniform Color does not color uniforms. What they do is provide a wide variety of companies with a supply of colorants and polymers that are extruded into pellets that allow products to stay true to the designated original, or “match” color throughout the manufacturing process.
“We control critical color,” explains Esser.
“Think about brand image – the Target reds or the John Deere greens – the things that say something about a brand,” she continues, “we ensure that the parts being made by various molders are going to have harmony in color. That John Deere green [part] is going to be the same John Deere green regardless of where it’s made, if we supply the color concentrate.”
Esser then goes back to the vision of a car’s interior. “When you sit there you want to see color harmony – actually, you don’t want to see anything, because if there’s a lack of harmony you’ll notice,” she laughs. “In that vehicle interior there are many different polymer types. We ensure that all of those match in color harmony to whatever the OEM has specified – and we often help them come up with their specifications.”
There can also be many different suppliers of the door panels, center console components, dashboards, visors and other elements that combine to create the interior of an automobile or truck. Those suppliers are usually Uniform Color customers.
| Color harmony in a vehicle interior. |
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There’s also a lot of fabric found in automotive interiors. “They’ll come in with a piece of fabric and ask us to produce a color for a plastic part that will match this fabric master. While the texture of fabric and plastic parts are obviously different,” Esser says, “we can produce a color that’s very close to the human eye.”
Asked if computers can’t make that kind of judgment call, Esser explains, “A computer will have great difficulty in determining a match between fabric and plastic. There are differences and the computer will just say there’s an error. The human eye will also pick up the differences but we’re minimizing the impact of those differences. The same will exist with metals, ceramics and vinyls. You don’t want to pick up on a difference between these materials and plastics. We pride ourselves on the ability to provide that critical color control.”