Transforming the paint-buying experience
How you find the right shades of paint for your project could be about to go through a dramatic revolution.
Rob Green and Rob Abrahams – the brains and creativity behind COAT Paints – believe they have the solution with a concept designed to make the whole paint-buying experience simple, sustainable and stress-free.
In a bold move, they’ve decided it’s time to ditch traditional paint tester pots as we know them. Not only do they create an abundance of waste paint, but unnecessary plastic too.
Having shared a career in the industry, these two entrepreneurs compliment each other with experience in paint and branding between them. They turned their innovative idea into a business in October 2020. Stick and peel samples are at the heart of the venture, something new and exciting for the industry.
We’re intrigued about the stick and peel samples. Tell us more about them...
The aim of our company is to provide a truly fantastic user experience. We made the decision not to go down the route of tester pots, mainly for sustainability reasons.
Our peel and stick swatches – in the real paint finish – are so easy; they can be placed on your wall and moved to various different positions to show the effect it will have in all different lights and places around a room. We believe this simplifies the experience and takes away all the headaches that often arise.
Why is simplicity so important to you and how else are you achieving it?
Our demographic is a trendy, young audience. A lot of our customers are first-time decorators who want this ease in their life; they want to know what is on trend and cool. We can help them with this.
We’ve also decided to limit our colour palette to around 35 colours. We didn’t want to offer the same old boring colours like some of our competitors, so we’ve designed a curated range based on top trends and tastes. We believe this avoids overwhelming customers with lots of different, but very similar kinds of colours.
We didn’t want to offer the same old boring colours like some of our competitors, so we’ve designed a curated range based on top trends and tastes.
Like it! As the saying goes, good things come in small packages so how else does being a smaller, start-up business help you in your vision?
It just means we can be super agile. Every month, we launch a new colour as a special working with design partners. If we see something that is particularly on trend or becoming popular because it’s been on a TV show, we can react and launch very quickly to meet market demands.
On top of this, we also go through regular colour reviews because we don’t want our palette to get stale. All our ingredients are from the UK and of course our manufacturing is too, so we can quickly make changes to our colours; this keeps things really fresh and current.
You see a lot of the bigger brands doing things like a ‘colour of the year’ and make a big thing of it, but we find that people move on in their trends very quickly so we need our range to reflect that.
Is there a particular colour that is trending at the moment?
All our colours are chosen to be on trend right now but, in terms of what’s hottest, it’s all about going bold with deep greens and blues like The Drink, or Ditch The Tie, or the Greiges and warm neutrals like Sunday Soul and Good Intentions from our range.
What about the paint itself. How does that stand up to the competition?
Like all quality paints, we’ve focused on ensuring high capacity of coverage, low VOC (Volatile Organic Compound) content and low odours. All our paints are water-based paints and they’re all deep colours with the highest possible level of scrub class available.
Our colours come in three core finishes which again keeps things simple and gives all the options you really need for interior jobs. A lot of our competitors promote a “one can does all” solution but in our experience it really doesn’t.
We’ve got flat matt with a two per cent sheen for walls and ceilings, a kitchen and bathroom paint, which has a 30 per cent soft sheen and is great for humid spaces. And there’s our wood and metal paints, which are perfect for doors, trims, skirting boards and upcycling furniture. It really flows and levels nicely to leave a smooth and highly durable finish.
