Sue Wadden (01:05): I'm just gonna, you know, get us started so people can meet you and learn a little bit about your background and your current roles. And so Kiki, let's start with you. Talk a little bit about how you've gotten to this point in your career and then the finishes and materials you specialize in.  

Kiki Redhead (01:20): Whew. I'm coming up on 25 years this year in CMF design. Started in the, you know, house paint, uh, architectural side of things with Sherwin-Williams actually. And then I started my own global color and trend agency and did that for 10 years before I came back to Sherwin-Williams. So it's been a journey and full circle. I've worked a lot in coatings as well as color concentrates and master batch for plastics colorants, as well as specializing in effect pigments like micas and metallics. And I've worked across a myriad of materials in my almost 25-year career doing this. Um, a plethora of different types of plastics, metals, from zinc and steel and aluminum, a lot of woods and composites, as well as even some textiles mixed in there for clothing and stuff like that, different clients that I had when I was on my own and had my business.  

Sue Wadden (02:29): There's a lot to unpack there and we're going to get into that a little bit, but I'm going to kick it over to Maggie. Um, and Maggie, tell us about you.  

Maggie O'Hare (02:36): Yeah, so I'm Maggie O'Hare. I lead the Industrial Wood Design House here in Greensboro, North Carolina. My background is a lot of furniture, so I come from the furniture industry, I have a lifetime of experience in that. So I've done everything from going to factories overseas to working in marketing in various roles throughout the industry. So now I'm here to bring all of that great knowledge to Sherwin-Williams for our industrial wood division.  

Sue Wadden (03:05): So let me shape this a little for those that are unfamiliar with sort of our more industrial coatings business. Sherwin-Williams is a global company, and we're mostly sometimes known for our architectural paint business. But Design House is our forecasting arm of our industrial sales, so our coating. So when Kiki talks about metal panels, that's like architectural cladding for skyscrapers or metal roofing or sort of that sort of commercial architectural space. We do, (laughs) we do work with all sorts of manufacturers. We coat furniture. We coat appliances. We coat products of... You know, you name it, from, you know, pots in your backyard all the way through, you know, tractors. And it's an aspect of Sherwin-Williams that not a lot of people are familiar with. So we're really looking to highlight the work that these ladies do and the importance of this in the coatings world.  (03:56): Maggie's in Furniture USA near High Point, North Carolina and so her background is to talk about and forecast what's going on in the world of wood. It's super important. So they work with some really very notable furniture manufacturers. After decades of experience that you have in this industry, what excites you the most about the work you do?  

Maggie O'Hare (04:14): I think my favorite part about working here with Sherwin-Williams and our customers is that many of our customers are actually my friends. There are people within my network that I've worked with throughout my entire life, so it's really great to see a lot of friendly faces and familiar faces come through the Design House. And furniture, it's in my blood, so it's something that I'm very passionate about, making great designs and great finishes for these wonderful designers. So it's really special.  

Sue Wadden (04:43): I love it. Kiki, how about you?  

Kiki Redhead (04:45): Well, I like helping our customers solve pain points around color, anything from, you know, managing color and quality control at the manufacturing level to bringing a new color to market and wowing the consumer, you know, at retail with something fabulous that brings emotion and excitement, you know, for the industry and for the, for the product. Collaborating with our customers and sharing knowledge is probably the most exciting part, getting to be creative and balancing that with the needs of the customer.  

Sue Wadden (05:22): I know we're going to get questions because everyone's going to be really interested, so talk about what... the kind of customers that Design House services. And then like what's a typical day look like, what's a project look like for you? Kiki, let's start with you.  

Kiki Redhead (05:34): So our customers are the what we call OEMs, original equipment manufacturers. And, and we work mostly directly with their product design teams or their marketing teams. Depending on the size of the company, some manufacturers will have hundreds and hundreds of industrial designers and CMF designers on staff. Smaller companies, someone in their marketing department may be in charge of curating the colors for their collection of products.  (06:04): So when we work with them, we offer different types of workshops. We kind of have three buckets of services that we offer at the Design House, from trend services to color design and development services, helping them through analyzing their palette and curating colors and then developing those colors, turning a concept into a reality and then preparing that color for manufacturing. And, and a lot of our customers manufacture all over the world, so we have to consider development of color for how it might be manufactured and applied in somewhere like Asia or Latin America, Europe, or anywhere around North America, which of course several different regions in North America as well have, you know, different requirements and regulations for the coatings application processes.  (07:08): So working with our customers and the types of services that we offer goes beyond just the trend and the color as well into marketing. And on our marketing side we, we do branding partnerships with our customers, we help them build out color sales tools like color cards and fan decks for their products. And we also give them access to our internal color design ecosystem. So we do a lot of collaborative work with your team, Sue, and Maggie's team as well, especially when our customers in the building products category are going to have their products adjacent to other products that might be coated and might be made of different substrates, whether that's walls for Sue or furniture cabinets, flooring for Maggie.  

Sue Wadden (08:00): Yeah, it's a little bit of our... you know, the world of Sherwin-Williams, which we're going to talk about in a minute. But Maggie, Kiki's business is a little different than yours in that it's OEM manufacturing. How does Greensboro Design House operate a little differently and i- it's really unique?  

Maggie O'Hare (08:13): So the Design House in Greensboro in North Carolina is totally unique in that we are located next to the furniture capital of the world, High Point, North Carolina. We have furniture market here which supports a ton of different brands, from more value-oriented brands to super high-end. And within those brands, we, we work primarily with the furniture designers and product developers within those companies.  (08:40): Beyond furniture, we work with cabinet companies. So that's everything from the stock cabinets that you'll find at Lowe's, all the way to more custom, really high-end pieces that you'll see without... throughout these luxury homes. We do flooring as well, and we also do building products. So that accounts for everything from exterior siding, all the way to the interior millwork that you see in a lot of beautiful homes.  

Sue Wadden (09:08): Talk a little bit about the stylists.  

Maggie O'Hare (09:09): So we have a few services here. One of our services that is really important to us is our color work. So we have a team of stylists here that account for over 150 years of finishing experience. And they're really truly a team of artists. They're led by Ricky McDaniel, he's our wonderful manager here. And what they do is that they bring these visions to life. So designers will come to the Design House with maybe a tear sheet or a sample that they want to match or create something totally unique, and they're able to interpret that and use the right amount of finishing products to create this beautiful layered piece. And that can be everything from a one-step finish that's very simple and easy to replicate, all the way to 12, 15, 17 steps on really high-end pieces.  

Sue Wadden (10:03): And just to qualify that, so when you say designers, it's actually manufacturers that come in.  

Maggie O'Hare (10:07): Yeah. Yes.  

Sue Wadden (10:08): It's not... So, you know, a lot of interior designers w- will listen to this show, so it's not that int- interior designers (laughs) can knock on your door and refinish furniture. This is for manufacturing.  

Maggie O'Hare (10:18): Exactly, exactly.  

Sue Wadden (10:19): (Laughs).  

Maggie O'Hare (10:20): So we are industrial wood in that, um, we work with the people who create the product that interior designers will, in essence, source or purchase. So-  

Sue Wadden (10:33): Exactly.  

Maggie O'Hare (10:33): ... when you come to, let's say, furniture market, you see a lot of our finishes on those pieces and that's been curated ahead of time, many months in advance and it's one of, um, the many things that makes the Design House special. But to go off of what Kiki said, we also offer trend forecasting services as well as palette assessments, which is really special.  

Sue Wadden (10:56): Well, we'll talk about it here in a second. But Kiki, can you talk about any... I, I don't know who you can share... um, if you have people that you've... companies that you've worked with that you either can share any information on about some of the really unique services that you provide in Minneapolis on, on your projects.  

Kiki Redhead (11:11): So I can certainly speak to segments and categories of product might allude to understanding or, uh, maybe ideating around for the audience who the customer might be. But we work very closely doing collaborative workshops in, uh, what we call our Velocity Color Development Workshop. It's where we have kind of conceptualized and ideated around potential new introduction color or finish or effect, texture with a customer. And we come together in Minneapolis and we take all of our CMF resources that we have, all of our raw materials, our pigments, different effects, we discuss gloss level, we look at different texture additives that we can do to give the coating some tactility. And we sit down around, uh, a table with, uh, D65 diffuse day lighting in a special room and we pull sample, sample, sample, sample, samples and we come up with kind of this, uh, formula, like a recipe, of how we see this color coming to life.  (12:33): And then what we do is we invite our lab team over, our color chemists. And we have several different types of technologies that we develop coatings in at our labs, our R&D labs in Minneapolis, a lot of liquid coatings for manufacturing, a lot of powder coatings, e-coat, coil extrusion for metal building products. And we bring the correct lab team over for whatever that product category segment is and we kind of lay everything out for them. And then I kind of transition from designer to more on the technical side. And I always joke about, you know, 20 plus years ago when I was in college, I never imagined that I would become a translator (laughs). Um, because essentially I'm taking the product designer's design speak and their language, their nomenclature that they're used to using, "We want this dustier. I want this warmer. I want this blue happier, maybe sparkly or shinier," and then I am translating that for our individual lab teams and our color chemist experts into specific types of pigments with their, their codes and percentages for formulations, like, "We'd like to use this Xirallic mica with a 30 micron at 2% of the formula." And we play around in... with those types of recipe ingredients, and the lab team takes those back, does their magic, and then comes back over to the Design House with physical panels and samples for us to evaluate and give feedback on.  (14:31): And we'll do that process until we kind of get that aha moment where the design team from our customer and myself kind of looks at that sample in our review room and says, "That's the one." And it goes from there.  

Sue Wadden (14:46): So having been at both Design Houses and seen how these finishes come to life, it's truly a unique experience. Um, but I'm trying to paint the picture for listeners that are-  

Kiki Redhead (14:57): Yeah.  

Sue Wadden (14:57): ... um, you know, they're not familiar. So you know, Kiki's told me about projects where a, a toolbox manufacturer came in, you know, freestanding toolbox, which is like kind of a decidedly masculine maybe thing, but they wanted to develop a feminine line of freestanding toolboxes. So she got to work on a really cool project that maybe, I don't know, had some pink in it or some different elements, um, that sort of translate color trend and applications to industrial finishes. You know, appliance companies that come in and want to do a small appliance that's maybe inspired by their color of the year. So she works as an integral process of that development process.  (15:34): And same with Maggie, Maggie's team, um, she works with some of the, the biggest furniture manufacturers that are out there. And again, we can't really talk about specific brands but really, really influential brands. Um, and it allows us this really nice unique position that we have this lens that we can see this kind of whole world of color and then bring those insights to our customer. And I think the easiest way to describe this is if you think of a Sherwin-Williams paint store, you stroll into that retail environment and you see there's a sign up above the entry and then there's wo-... there's metal framing on windows, there's obviously masonry and exterior coatings on the outside. But then you walk in and there's industrial flooring and there's coatings on, you know, the racking that holds all our paint. And then maybe we've got interior signage.  (16:20): And so when you think of that world of coatings, Sherwin-Williams can cover and coat all of those surfaces. And again, we're kind of scratching the surface on these opportunities to kind of align our customers under this umbrella, and it's really an exciting time. So Kiki, Maggie and I get to work on those projects often, and I think it's one of the favorite things that we get to do in our jobs.  

Kiki Redhead (16:42): Yeah, for your question and, and the topics you were just bringing up, Sue, we have so many different segments that we, that we touch. We have 1,600 colors for our sign customers who literally build and manufacture signs for the outside and wayfinding signs for interiors. That's six- 1600 solids and another 614 mica metallic finishes for signs alone. Um, so when you, when you're out in retail and you, you know, see a sign somewhere, you can now think, "Oh my gosh, maybe Sherwin-Williams coated that." And you're shopping for...  (17:23): You know, you brought up appliances, which is one of my favorite categories 'cause we've had such a major impact in our partnerships with our customers. The, the appliance manufacturers out there, you're seeing a lot of fun blues and greens coming to laundry machines and even kitchen appliances. You mentioned the pop appliance colors that we get to do on a lot of, uh, countertop appliances like toasters and mixers and blenders. But one of my favorite things that's happening right now that I'm seeing is window and door manufacturers who are like so excited about redefining and refining their color offerings to align more with the evolution and the shifts that we're seeing in exterior color schemes.  (18:18): And when you add all of this together and all of the different materials that are on the exterior of homes, to see window and door manufacturers making such large moves to update color collections from... you know, away from colors like the boysenberries of the 1990s and early 2000s and the dark forest greens that, um, are softening now and becoming more natural greens, it's really impactful to see that because you can drive down any street now and see those changes across the homes in America.  

Sue Wadden (19:00): Well, and it's a perfect segue into my next question, which is, you know, what is the trend development process look like for each of you? Talk about... which this is my fa-... another great topic, the timelines and how far in advance you're considering trends for your segments.  

Maggie O'Hare (19:16): Exactly. The timelines for each industry that we serve are totally unique and different, but they all really do tie together at the end because they're all wood-based industries. So I think, first and foremost, who leads the charge for our trends and timelines is furniture. Furniture has a six month... every six months there's new product coming out, which is insane. It's very closely tied to the cadence of, let's say, fashion. So it's the fashion for the home essentially. And, um, so we stay very busy here helping brands to curate their beautiful finishes for their next line, their next line. And they're thinking about a year, a year and a half out, which is a lot of fun.  (20:03): For cabinets, the trends are much more long-lived, right? That's something that you can't really replace in your home easily. So we try to look at least 10 to 12 years out when we're predicting colors and making recommendations. And the same goes for floors. Floors are a huge commitment within the home, so we want to make sure that we're looking farther out into the color atmosphere to see what's coming over the horizon. And then for building products, like Kiki was saying, the doors, the siding, the windows, those are really classic colors, but they do need updating. So we're helping customers to shift those colors. And those are really long-lived colors as well, at least 10 to 15 years.  

Sue Wadden (20:48): So just a quick anecdote. When we... Maybe when we started working together, we were talking about cabinet colors. And at the time, you know, white and gray were like at the top of the pyramid of favorability. Um, everybody had white and gray in their kitchen cabinets. And then very quickly post-COVID, there was a shift back to an importance on stained cabinets. Talk about... Can you talk about that a little bit?  

Maggie O'Hare (21:11): Yeah, absolutely. So we saw gray coming over the horizon years in advance, but gray really had a moment. It had a chokehold on every part of the home, including wood as well. So there was a lot of gray stains, a lot of these sun-bleached and kind of like organic type grays. And they were beautiful, they were stunning. But I think what happened during the pandemic and the paradigm shift that happened with consumers and homeomer- homeowners and all of us alike is that we were surrounded by a lot of gray. Working from home, being at home a lot, being locked in, we got fatigue thinking about and seeing a lot of gray. And so what we saw happen over the pandemic is an embrace towards warmer colors, which of course wood is always going to favor warmer colors. So wood stains in particular have become a lot warmer and wood as a substrate has become much more popular amongst interior designers and homeowners alike. So we've seen a shift from gray, and we're headed into our brown era, which as a wood girly, I'm loving.  

Sue Wadden (22:24): It's awesome. It's such a... It was so, so needed. We were desperate for change from the gray and white... (laughs) the gray and white universe that we had for so long. Kiki, talk about the color trend development timeline for your business because it's, it's much different.  

Kiki Redhead (22:38): Yeah, so we work with a tri-level trend forecasting methodology: mega, macro, micro. Mega trends are, you know, 10 plus years out. So we... You know, similar to kind of what Maggie touched on a little bit, there's industries and categories of products that we design for that... you know, we have to look 10, 20, 30 years out for based off of technological advancements, cultural movements, economy, politics, sustainability, and climate. And when new technology is coming down the pipeline, this might shift our capabilities of what we can do with color and design.  (23:21): So the second level is the macro level. That's the more actionable level where we actually start to see some emerging of the, of the trends and we can track those trends, we can spot those trends, we can understand where they're coming from and how they're going to impact consumer behaviorism, purchasing power, things like that. That's usually right around five to 10 years. And that's kind of our sweet spot for the different industries that we work with.  (23:56): We can distill further down, but I would say for our side of the business, the shortest timeline that we really work with at the micro level would be three to five years. You know, we don't get into the home decor side of things. The types of products that we work on in general industrial or global industrial and our coil and extrusion teams is products that are going to be affixed or incorporated into design for at least three to five years.  

Sue Wadden (24:32): Yeah. And like if you had to put products in that category, so from the macro, like long time, you know, 10-year timelines, that's, you know, windows, that's building materials, that's appliance colors, automotive finishes. Those are like really long arcing colors. And maybe... And correct me if I'm wrong, I'm paraphrasing here. That might be the difference between, you know, three shades of gray, right? Like that's a very conservative timeline. Whereas kind of at the, uh, micro level that might be furniture, like, uh, tools and hardware, that might be, uh, plumbing hardware, right? That's kind of in that mid middle timeline. Yeah. And then, um, you know, like exterior pots for your yard, you know, that would be a much faster timeline, which you guys do a little bit of that, but not as much as may- maybe on Maggie's side that it's a little faster moving.  (25:23): So it's just a really interesting discussion, and not a lot of people think about that when they're buying products. You know, the iPhone is the easiest example, how rose gold developed, um, and kind of took over from one product. It really influenced at a, at a high level global color at that timeline. So that's a really fascinating part of our job. And Kiki is really amazing at futurist thinking, does a ton of research as part of a lot of organizations around the globe that really think about those color and finishes and how they're going to impact color globally.  (25:58): Let that lead us into our process. You know, color mix is our architectural report, but in our forecasting environment, you know, Kiki and Maggie are subject matter experts that we lean on really heavily to inform our global reporting. Um, so can you guys talk... each of you talk about your, your research process and how that's sort of changed over time?  

Kiki Redhead (26:18): Sure, yeah, I'll start. I have kind of created what I call the six pillars. It's trend management, identification and research, data and analysis, trend tracking and trend spotting, and then, um, reporting and application.  (26:36): So one of the biggest movements or the differences in how I forecast now than I did, you know, 10 or even 20 years ago, is technology. A lot more data ana- analysis and analytical tools that we're using, even algorithms, to kind of help us pull red threads and connect the dots in our research. So while we're still, and very important, boots on the ground, going to trade shows, experiencing cultural events, um, immersing ourselves in the world of behaviorism and psychology, as well as looking to a lot of those futurist groups for influence from their research, the World Future Society, Foresight Councils, Future Today Institute, groups like that who are putting out some of that big megatrend stuff that I discussed earlier and kind of bringing that in, shuffling that into our new technologies and our trend management programs.  (27:49): So there's been a huge, I would say, lift off of some of the parts of the process that would take going through spreadsheets and sales data. To be able to have teams that are helping us put those things together has allowed us then to concentrate more on the distillation of understanding how we get from a big picture idea like sustainability down to the shifting of the nature, nurture colors back to warm and then pinpoint specific browns that are coming into the marketplace, right? And how we can tell that story through coatings is kind of where I see the biggest change in our process.  

Sue Wadden (28:39): We're going to get back to that in the next question I have about it. So, so keep the brown in mind and we're going to talk about that. But Maggie, how about for you? Discuss how your process, um, it's a little different than Kiki's.  

Maggie O'Hare (28:51): It is a little different, you're right. So what we do in industrial wood for trend forecasting is that we really wanna be, like Kiki said, boots on the ground at a lot of trade shows, fashion shows, cultural events. And then we also do a lot of research socially. So I'm go-... always have my finger on the pulse of social media, what's going on, what trends are coming out of younger generations, and what's really gonna be long-lived. One thing that I have noticed that has changed over time is the cadence of trends has really sped up. I think this is due to just the overall shareability of social media and trends really speeding up these micro trends that we're seeing pop up everywhere. So that has been the biggest shift for us, is that trends are moving faster than ever, which means that it's really important for us to do this research and look farther ahead so that we can help our customers make wise decisions.  

Sue Wadden (29:52): A hundred percent. I think that speed of trends is also creating a little fatigue. People get exhausted by having to keep up. So that could be also the reason why we've seen a, a real resurgence on, uh, black and white as like almost like a palette cleanser across a lot of industries, especially that we see. Um, on the architectural side, it's been a fascinating transition, and I think something that we're gonna pay attention to and continue to pay attention to.  (30:16): But I wanna talk for a second about the idea of brown. So we do a color of the year, Sherman-Williams does a color of the year, and our group is the research arm that puts that color together. And so we'll talk about Urbane Bronze, that was our 2021 color of the year. Again, in the midst of COVID, we knew browns were gonna have significance, and as, as Kiki had said, sort of the naturalization of color was gonna come on in a big, big, big way. But that color of the year as a prediction allowed our customers to see not only for architectural walls, it was gonna have an impact on the industrial side as well. So Kiki, can you talk a little bit about how Urbane Bronze influenced, uh, your side of the business?  

Kiki Redhead (30:56): Yeah, it really started the slow movement from blacks into the bronzes. The biggest impact that we're seeing is this kind of what's new and what's next with black. And that brown and that bronze and that warming up from everything in metal finishes and hardware and plumbing and appliance and lighting, outdoor furniture, like metal outdoor furniture, roofing, siding, all of these categories of building products and accessories to, to those in home decor and accents is slowly moving.  (31:41): And one of the things that often happens when we start to see these types of trends is we get the question of, you know, "Are you predicting the trends or are you creating the trends?" And I would say it has a little bit of a balance of both. You know, we, we did our due diligence, we did our research, we foresaw the evolution and the emergence of the browns and the bronzes earlier than some of the other market categories started to really notice it. And we launched the Urbane Bronze as that color of the year. But it still takes the product manufacturers, the designers, the interior designers, the architects, and the consumers time to transition, because throwing away your brand new stainless steel refrigerator (laughs) for a bronze, you know, coated refrigerator isn't an easy task to do.  (32:52): So seeing this transition from the blacks though I think for us is one of the most influential and the area in which I'm the most anticipating the biggest change as it relates to bui- building products. And that dark bronze, warmer blacks going softer, dusty, or deep charcoal, undertones with the warm undertones, which again is just essentially a dark bronze.  

Sue Wadden (33:20): Maggie, same, like, same question for you. So we were predicting the rise of bronze coming early on, right in the 2000s. How did that, how did that impact your business?  

Maggie O'Hare (33:31): It impacted it a lot.  

Sue Wadden (33:32): (Laughs).  

Maggie O'Hare (33:32): You can see behind me, we are a fan of Urbane Bronze here.  

Sue Wadden (33:36): (Laughs).  

Maggie O'Hare (33:36): But I think as... to add on to what Kiki said, the warming of these high contrast colors, both the blacks and the bronzes and well as the whites, has played a huge part in what we do and the products that we coat. We've, um, seen that specifically play out in the exterior of the homes. We see a lot of high contrast looks... or we were at least seeing a lot of high contrast looks with white houses and black trim, but it wasn't that cool stark very dark bla-... jet black. It's more of this soft color, and I think it plays really well throughout the home, um, even down to furniture. So going from the outside to the inside, like Kiki said, hardware has been the number one change. I think for us in our industry is the embrace of that warm black hardware, that bronzed... oiled bronze look has been huge throughout the home, and that has really influenced the way that we perceive finishes.  

Sue Wadden (34:36): I love that. I can't wait. You know, every season, every year that we talk about trends, it's a really exciting time for us because we're shaping the stories of what's to come. And so I just want our listeners to really understand all that goes into sort of the serious business of color that we've dedicated our careers to. And I think it's an amazing story. So thank you guys for like your definite insights here. But now I wanna have some fun. So I want you guys to think about, you know, what are your favorite recent color moments just from what you've been seeing? Can you share something?  

Kiki Redhead (35:07): Yeah, recently in Solon AI, I had a lot of really fun color moments. One of the ones that keeps coming back to me is the neons, or like the backlit color. The transition, looking at it generationally being a child of the '80s and experiencing these day glow and neon colors and black light type colors, you know, as a child and teenager is totally different than the vibe that these very same colors are bringing now from like the digital experience AR/VR experience that this new younger generation is translating from these spaces where they're spending their time in the, you know, Oculus glasses and you know, their life online. And then bringing those colors with them into kind of the real world and seeing those colors again and how they're being used is really exciting. That was some special color moments.  (36:19): But also the connection of the natural and the balance between these like alt high power, super bright fun neons and then the balance of that with the warm neutrals, the browns, the... well, kind of like my background here, these terracotta tones, these nature's neutral greens, golds, and kind of experiencing that dichotomy and the pendulum swing between the colors that are being introduced in product in Europe right now, so...  

Sue Wadden (36:56): Love it. I would just like wanna add an anecdote there on the sort of digital side of color. You know, we've seen reports on how next generation is gonna want architectural products that react with LED lighting. So maybe you paint your walls white or creamy neutral or something light, and then you have ambient LED lighting that reacts to the surface and changes color. And so it's interesting where technology is gonna take even just, you know, traditional paint and coatings for walls and surfaces and something that we're staying really close to because who knows, you know, what the next 10 years will bring there. So you know, we're gonna talk about that a little bit later (laughs) off the podcast. But Maggie, how about you, what are some of your most recent favorite moments?  

Maggie O'Hare (37:38): Gosh. Well, we're, at least in the wood industry, we're really embracing these beautiful, nuanced, organic colors. So this is everything from nature-inspired colors like a sun-bleached oak or a mushroom or fawn color, these really richly layered colors. And they pair so well with some of the more nuanced and moody colors that we're seeing come to the forefront, like a really nice dusty green or a rich dark blue. So yeah, I'm, I'm really excited. I have actually a sample here of one of our finishes that we've created, and this is, uh, on a beautiful piece of oak. This kind of beautifully illustrates that organic kind of sun-bleached, rustic look that we're seeing so popular today.  

Sue Wadden (38:26): Gorgeous. Gorgeous. All right, guys, well we're gonna wrap this up. So, um, you've been really insightful guests. Thank you so much for spending time. But how can listeners get in touch or take advantage of all that Sherwin-Williams Design House has to offer?  

Kiki Redhead (38:40): Yeah, I mean, you can connect with me on LinkedIn, follow the Design House on Instagram, SW Industrial Design. I mean, if you're a product designer or a product manufacturer out there, get in touch with your Sherwin-Williams rep. Look us up at designhouse.sherwin.com, that's our website. So lots, lots of touchpoints out there. Reach out and we- we'd love to connect.  

Sue Wadden (39:04): And Maggie, how about you?  

Maggie O'Hare (39:05): Yeah, so we have a wonderful LinkedIn page. If you get on LinkedIn and search for Sherwin-Williams Industrial Wood, that's where you'll find us. We post a lot of great content on there, panels and finishes of the month. And you can also find me on LinkedIn as well.  

Sue Wadden (39:21): That's awesome. And we'll put these links in the show notes, uh, so people can check in, you don't have to remember it (laughs). We'll make it easy for you. But again, thank you so much for joining. But before we go, we wanna take a moment to congratulate our June Designer of the Month, Christine Craig, who is CEO of Designology, a southern California design studio that specializes in creating laid-back luxury for real life. Find out more and get in touch at designologystudio.com and on Instagram at designologystudio. Congrats, Christine.  (39:51): So again, thank you, Kiki, thank you, Maggie. This has been really fascinating. Um, we appreciate your time today and, uh, hope, you know, we'll be talking soon.  

Kiki Redhead (39:59): Thank you, Sue.  

Maggie O'Hare (40:00): Thanks.  

Kiki Redhead (40:06): Thanks so much for listening. Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review, and tell other color and design lovers about our show. See you next time on Colormixology.