Monochromatic, Neutrals and Greens: Trending Color Schemes in Metal Roofing

By Dani Sheehan. 

The right color palette can increase your business. See what colors are trending and how color is evolving in the metal roofing industry. 

In the most recent episode of MetalCast, Karen Edwards sits down with Kiki Redhead and Brynn Wildenauer of Sherwin-Williams to talk about color trends with the FUSE architectural color forecast. They discuss how to choose the best colors for your business, what’s becoming popular and how color can improve your business.  

Brynn is the architectural color designer for the Sherwin-Williams coil and extrusion business and focuses on trend forecasting, color development, product development and marketing materials for sales teams. Kiki is the global head of color, material, finish and trend, for the performance coatings group and also leads their design house efforts. They both love color and talk about how important it is for a business. As Kiki explains, “If you’re looking at metal roofing or metal siding, if you’ve got the right colors in your collection to guide your customer or even the consumer, you’ll see your sales drive more towards those colors.” 

Their FUSE report shows trend forecasting and extensive research goes into identifying trends that are relevant for the market. They look at the megatrend of what’s happening globally, and then break it down into different stories. Kiki continues, “So, macro trends are like the trends for the next five to ten years that are everything from consumer trends to product trends to technology trends to manufacturing trends, architecture and design trends. And then, each of those three trend stories are supported by six emerging colors in the marketplace.” 

Brynn adds that they can explore color trends by regional market. She says, “We’re seeing a lot of trends in lessening contrast of buildings. So, we see, still popping up in Texas or Tennessee, the black roof with the white house. We’re seeing that level of contract kind of come together a bit into more monochromatic schemes. As we look at that, the grays are coming back up, like hot, hot, hot.” The other big trend right now is rising popularity in neutral colors. She continues, “We’re seeing neutrals warming up pretty heavily right now in the market across the board. So, as we’re seeing the stark whites that maybe have a blue undertone, we’re seeing that kind of darken a bit and also add some warmth to it.” 

Once you can identify a trend, you must be able to show the colors in action. Brynn says this is a big part of the FUSE report. It helps take the guesswork out of it and shows what a color would look like on a certain building and how the color palette comes together. “So, we’re looking at how color schemes are evolving, how color is evolving, different effects in the market that are becoming more and more popular to individualize the products per customer or per project. And taking all this data and bringing it together and showing how this would work in application.” 

Read the transcript, Listen to the podcast or Watch the webinar to hear more about staying on color trends to help your business boom.