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Winsor & Newton: 1,000 colours in your pocket
Perhaps watercolour cakes were the iPod of their day. Hear us out…
Disruptive product innovations come in all shapes and sizes. What ties them together is an ability to identify a common need and a knack for problem solving. Put simply, these products make our lives easier.
Consider paper currency, a lightweight and cheaper alternative to coins. Or the printing press, which enabled information to spread across the world. There’s the compass. The battery. And more recently the iPod, Apple’s ground-breaking music system in miniature. If you allow us to indulge in a little playful comparison, you might also consider Winsor & Newton’s pioneering art materials. Perhaps their moist watercolour cakes really were the iPod of their day. Hear us out…
Let’s go back to 1835, the year in which Winsor & Newton launched the first moist watercolour cakes. These little pans of water-soluble paint enabled artists to wake up the colour instantly thanks to a new formula that used glycerine instead of honey. Flash forward to 1976, when Apple entered the computer industry as just another expensive technology provider. It wasn't until the 2001 release of the iPod that they transformed the music industry forever. The small, lightweight device enabled consumers to easily purchase and download music digitally, disrupting the physical media distribution system of CDs and cassettes.
Winsor & Newton and Steve Jobs were smart thinkers when reacting to industry competition. In 1781, art brand Reeves had introduced watercolour cakes, making painting more portable. Prior to this, colours had to be prepared manually by artists or colourmen, and paint would dry out quickly. By adding honey to the formula, the paint became re-wettable. However, re-wetting was an arduous process – the cakes needed to be immersed in water before use then rubbed vigorously into an oyster shell or ceramic dish.
Winsor & Newton decided then that it was their job to make painting even easier for artists. The result? They invented a new type of watercolour cake by injecting their magic ingredient: glycerine. This formed a wet formula that allowed paint to be easily reactivated with water, both replacing a laborious process and reducing the amount of equipment artists needed to have with them at all times. The moist watercolour cake allowed artists to create paintings instantly, with the touch of a wet brush.
Over at Apple, Jobs and his team knew they needed to compete with telecommunications giants quickly and effectively. Before the iPod was in business, Samsung and Nokia had already figured out how to play music from phones. There were polyphonic ringtones and built-in MP3 players, and storage capacities of up to 20 songs. It was then that Apple assembled the iPod, which not only offered practicality, but also the magic of owning thousands of songs held in a tiny device. Playing music from a phone was one thing, but having an entire music library reachable from your pocket was something else entirely.
Where Apple’s iPod used the tagline ‘1,000 songs in your pocket’, Winsor & Newton’s moist watercolour cake could have worked with ‘1,000 colours in your pocket’. Both products enabled users to benefit from them when on-the-go. The iPod solved the issue of limited storage and cumbersome music players, while the cake enabled artists to do without carrying and using excessive equipment, especially valuable for those who painted en plein air. The iPod transformed Apple into a global entertainment company, paving the way for iconic products like the iPhone and iPad. Similarly, Winsor & Newton's moist watercolour cake allowed them to extend their range from brushes such as Queen Victoria’s much beloved Series 7 watercolour brush, launched in 1866, to the twin-tipped nib technology of Promarker in 2015. Although some would argue that nothing was as impactful as the collapsible screw-cap tube for oil paint in 1842 and watercolour in 1846.
The metal paint tube was already on the market, having been invented by American oil painter John Goffe Rand. The tubes worked as syringes however, so when William Winsor heard of the product, he immediately sought the patent for a tube with an essential design improvement: an all-important screw cap. And so, the paint tube we know and love today was born. Artists could now squeeze out just the amount of paint they needed and preserve the rest for later, allowing them increased flexibility and the possibility of a larger palette, as colours took longer to perish.
What these artists and music lovers needed was to be understood. Despite their differences, both Winsor & Newton and Steve Jobs have embodied what is possible when creative minds truly recognize their audience’s needs and seek to do something about it. This is especially relevant today. An upshot of the pandemic has meant an increased demand for art materials that is growing every year. People are continually finding more possibility and pleasure from making art, using materials that are uniquely created with them in mind.
For more information:
Joe Davis - Global Brand Communications Manager joe.davis@colart.com
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