An interior designer turns her paint advice into a company.

Clare went live on 31 July 2018, as both Architectural Digest and Business of Home reported that day. It was founded by Nicole Gibbons, an interior designer who serves as its chief executive. English Wikipedia says Gibbons launched a decorating blog, So Haute, in January 2008, set up a design business in Manhattan that year and joined the Oprah Winfrey Network series Home Made Simple as a design expert in 2013. Architectural Digest says she began her career in public relations at Victoria’s Secret before moving into design full time.

Gibbons told Architectural Digest that her aim had long been to build a brand rather than only a design firm, and that the traditional route of licensing a designer’s name looked less promising to her than the start-up model she saw at companies such as Casper, Birchbox and Warby Parker, which sold directly to customers online. She said that she had quietly retired from interior design about a year before the launch to concentrate on the new company. Business of Home reported that Clare’s first round of funding had closed in December 2017, with investors including First Round Capital, Imaginary Ventures, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures and Bullish, as well as founders of Casper and Harry’s as individual backers.

The problem Gibbons set out to solve was the experience of choosing paint. In her interview with Business of Home she described homeowners who made repeated trips to big-box stores over weeks and still disliked the colour they ended up with, and she listed the difficulties as she saw them: too many colours, too many product lines, too little information about ingredients and a slow, costly sampling process. Clare was designed to answer each of those in turn, with a website instead of a store, a small edited range and a sampling method that did not involve wet paint.

A short palette, colour names with a wink and samples that stick to the wall.

The colour range is the centre of the brand. Gibbons told Business of Home that designers know you do not need endless variations, and that the launch palette was built to include a warm white, a cool white and a clean neutral white with no undertone, alongside colours meant to feel timeless to both homeowners and interior designers. Architectural Digest reported that she tested a long list of formulations before settling on the final range, and that at launch the paint came in eggshell and semi-gloss finishes. “We lead with color,” she told the magazine, explaining that Clare leaves out technical terms because colour is what most people are choosing.

The names are where the brand’s voice is loudest. Architectural Digest reported that Money Moves, a mint green, is an ode to Cardi B, and that Nairobi Blue nods to the gown Lupita Nyong’o wore to the Oscars. Gibbons told Business of Home that Blue Ivy was inspired by Beyoncé and that Motor City refers to her hometown of Detroit. Other launch colours shown in the coverage included Wing It, Avocado Toast, Headspace and Make Waves.

Sampling was redesigned as part of the identity. Clare’s swatches are printed on peel-and-stick paper that customers place directly on their walls; Gibbons told Business of Home they arrive in a branded envelope and let people test colours in one step with no mess, replacing trips for paint chips, fan decks and sample pots. The company also launched an online colour-recommendation tool, Color Genius, which Gibbons compared to having an interior designer help choose. Both remain on Clare’s website, which now presents the swatch as the Perfect Color Swatch and the tool as the Clare Color Genius. In May 2023 Retail Dive still described Gibbons as founder and chief executive, and reported that the range by then included exterior as well as interior paint.

Design and documentation.

The paint brands in this group sit at very different points in the trade. Some are long-established manufacturers whose names have passed through several owners, and whose cans are sold through hardware chains, dedicated stores and trade counters; others are younger companies that sell mainly online or from a handful of showrooms, often built around a short, edited list of colours rather than a vast library.

A paint brand’s identity is carried by more than a logo. It lives in the can and its label, in the fan deck and the swatch card, in the names given to colours, in the store or website where people choose them, and in programmes that pick out a colour for the year. Because the company behind a name may have been sold, merged or closed, and because paint can be made far from where it is marketed, the plain questions are worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where the paint is actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A paint brand styled like the start-ups it admired.

Clare’s look was deliberately set apart from the paint aisle. Architectural Digest wrote in 2018 that its user experience, packaging and printed material felt fresh and young, and reported that Gibbons worked with an illustrator to create playful artwork for the website. It said the paint cans and tools used minimal packaging with a sans-serif typeface, and that the packaging colour was a soft yellow, chosen, Gibbons joked, because she thought blue was overused among start-ups. The magazine added that she personally styled the photographs on the site.

The name was part of the same strategy. Gibbons told Business of Home that she wanted something easy to remember, feminine and able to carry a personality, in contrast to the names she saw across the category, such as Benjamin Moore, Sherwin-Williams and Behr. She said Clare comes from a Latin word meaning “bright and brilliant,” and that she liked the wordplay: bright for colour, brilliant for forward-thinking.

The voice carries through to the company’s own pages today. Clare’s Our Story page opens with “Hi, we’re Clare” and says the company is on a mission to make paint shopping easy and inspiring, describing designer-curated colours, mess-free swatches and paint and supplies delivered to the door. It calls the company a colour authority and pairs product pages with a blog, a gallery and a quiz, continuing Gibbons’s 2018 plan to keep advising customers long after the paint has dried. The site is published by Clare Paint LLC.

For a design guide, Clare shows how a paint company can make colour naming, sampling and packaging into the brand, borrowing the tone of consumer start-ups rather than the trade counter. Compare Backdrop, another online paint brand with playful colour names, and Benjamin Moore, one of the established names it set itself against. For this guide we use swatch yellow, mint, warm white and umber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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