If you were paying attention to the blog a few weeks again, you may have noticed that we just picked up the Colourlock lineup, so we had to stop by the booth while here at SEMA 2019. Good thing we did, because we just had our first look at the Colourlock Scanner! This tool helps you match the color of the leather seats you are working on with the exact dye colors that Colourlock offers. This way if you have to perform any repairs, you are working with the matched up leather dye. Below is more information directly from Ram Iyer of Colourlock UK, a video directly from the SEMA floor with James Melfi, along with some photos!

Colourlock has launched a special scanner that will help installers to match leather paints more accurately and more quickly.

This device removes the hurdle of trying to mix the perfect color by eye alone, which is often time-consuming. It comes with a free, downloadable app containing more than 2,000 formulations from various manufacturers. Users simply place the scanner over the leather car upholstery then, once it has read the color, it will synchronize with the app via Bluetooth. The app will show the required formulation from Colourlock’s 27 base colors. For example, beige requires a mixture of white, blue, yellow and green and the app will detail the percentage amounts for achieving the desired color. So far it has proved an accuracy rate of 90-95% and has removed the guesswork associated with the manual system. Plans are already underway to expand the number of formulations on the app to 20,000. Color matching just got a whole lot easier!

Video Transcription

00:00

Hey guys, it’s James with detailed image. We are at the colourlock USA booth at SEMA and we have something I think is really cool. It’s something totally new to the detailing, the leather repair market. Something that’s going to I think be a really neat thing. Where here with Ram, tell us a little bit about it. Right. So the bit that we’re talking about is the colourlock scanner. Now anyone who does leather repairs, especially installers and professional guys in the trade in the business know that the most aggravating part of doing leather repairs is, is mixing the paint in the color match. Absolutely. Spot on. That is where a lot of guys spend a lot of time and there’s a lot of skill that’s involved mixing and matching and going back and forth and making sure it’s perfect. Absolutely right.

00:47

So we’ve been looking at various different ways that we can help guys to reduce that amount of time that they spend. Okay. And especially for beginners, what you, well, you don’t even have that confidence. This scanner can help. This device can help you. This is kind of for both, this is for a DIY setting, right? Or this can be a professional as well. Could, could use this tool. Yep. I mean a DIY person could use it, but in order to use this tool, you’re going to have to have all the base colors that we supply. Primarily for the professional user. Absolutely. Okay. Yeah, I’d say more, more geared to it’s the professional use. Awesome. Awesome. Okay. Okay. So yeah, we’ve, we’ve got an app called the colourlock watch pro, which is, which is awesome, right? I’m not Scott about near enough 2000 formulation from there is different manufacturers, but that’s, that’s loaded on there.

01:44

And we’re, we’re constantly updating this as well. Okay. We’ve got we’ve got a much bigger scanner at our HQ where we mix I think roughly about 200 to 250 paints every day. Wow. Right. and that, that scanner is very expensive. But actually creates a formulation, right? So you, you, you scan a piece of leather underneath it. It’s calibrated. That’s kind of just calibrated with all our base colors. Okay. And that comes up with a formulation. If you make any adjustments to it manually, you’d love those changes and that’s them saved as the recipe has the recipe onto the database. And what you’ve got in the app is that recipe you’ve got, what we’ve just done is loaded all those recipes and formulations you guys have over the years. And now we’re in this app and this machine helps us identify those restaurants.

02:40

So we’ve been mixing roughly about 200 paints every day for the last 15 to 20 years. Right. So there’s lots of different formulations in there. Right? At this point in time, the app is only got about 2000 okay. Our challenge is to find yet. It’s still a lot number, a decent number. But for us, got to find a way to get more of those formulations or as many as physically possible in here. Right. It’s just a software thing that we’re, we’re, we’re trying to find a way to do that at the moment. But once done, what this kind of does is scans the leather, but rather than creating its own formulation, it looks at the database. Yes. Right. And gives the closest match. Wow. So you know, it’s a numbers game. A lot point, the more formulations you’ve got loaded in here, I can identify the more accurate this, this, this can be.

03:37

Wow. Wow. Right. And I think that’s where we, that’s where we were different to how perhaps some other people do it. Gotcha. Gotcha. Just so let’s just, let me just show you very quickly if you’d like to see. Absolutely. Absolutely. The apps been, the scan is connected to the app via Bluetooth very quick. So I’m just going to hit T to match. Right. I’m going to move this here across to this piece of leather that we’re trying to get a formulation for, right. We just want to make sure that it’s sit flush to it so there’s no light entering that little gap. The, that can change the formulation. Okay. Right. And you can see it’s measuring, right. Wow. And it’s given us three different formulations. What you want to look at. Yeah. In terms of the closeness of the match is you want to

04:31

You want to look, there’s a, there’s a Delta figure right here. Can you see that? Yup. Right? So the lower the Delta figure, the better the match. Okay. Right? So it’s giving you three here. The first one is 1.39, the second one being 1.63 and the last one being 1.74. Right? So you’d be inclined to go, you would want to go with the first one and hopefully that, should give you a very, very close match. But we’ve done the test and I know for a fact this’ll give you a 90% 90 to 95% match, right? And if you’ve just got to tweak a little bit at the end and if you’ve been to one of our trainings and you, you then you would have learned how to use the color wheel, how to, how to adjust colors, then you just need to make those final tweaks to get it. That a hundred percent match. And that’s where something that used to take people an hour to do, hopefully is going to be, you know, you know, guys are going to be able to do it and let’s say 10, 15 minutes. Huge, huge time savings and a pretty cool piece of tech. Just like, yeah. Awesome. that’s great dude. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much again. We are at the colourlock USA booth at SEMA 2019. Stay tuned for more guys.