DEVINE STORY

The Devine Color^® story

Founder Gretchen Schauffler believes there are no right or wrong stops and turns in life, just a colorful journey. Her story of how she created a new way for women to think about and interact with paint color, as well as succeed in what has traditionally been a male-dominated industry, is inspiring.

A tale of two climates, two cultures

When Gretchen was ten years old, her mother unexpectedly moved the family from the very metropolitan Caribbean city of San Juan, Puerto Rico, to a laid back setting in Oregon. Gretchen found herself dealing with a major life transition at an impressionable age. Having one foot in one culture and the other foot in another, Gretchen would learn that the constant back and forth travel between her two worlds gave her a lot of insights into how things are never really perfect, but that you can make where ever you are an expression of who you are.

A curious mind and a creative journey toward success

Gretchen began her college life majoring in art therapy, but she would change her major several times before she entered a graphic design program at Portland State, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree.

Motherhood, suburbia and a colorful hobby

Gretchen ended a career in pharmaceutical sales in the 1990s and moved to the Portland suburbs to raise a family. With the strong connection to color from her upbringing in Puerto Rico—where the buildings are awash in bright colors, and the Caribbean Ocean sparkles with vibrant blues and greens—and the powerful presence of nature surrounding her in the Pacific Northwest, Gretchen began to express herself by working on colors for her home, creating backgrounds for her art as a way to introduce her children to color and educate them about their heritage.

Gretchen found herself experimenting with a collage technique that helped her create color compositions with anything from paper, to texture to paint. People who came to her home loved her unique combinations. Her colors exuded personality, expression and understanding. And they all seemed to belong together.

By bringing the colors of the Caribbean and the Northwest into her home, Gretchen began to feel herself living not in the past or the future, but in the now. She began, too, to see that people were drawn to colors as a way to make them feel something.

From color consultant to Devine Color^® founder

It didn't take long for word to get out about Gretchen's color consulting, or her unique color philosophy. Together with a regional paint company, she set about creating a new color paint line that delivered perfect colors in paint gallons; perhaps most intriguing, the paint had a unique thickness—one that went on like yogurt.

Discovering yogurt

In March of 2001, Devine Color^® launched in 15 stores. It would come to be known as the paint that went on like rich yogurt, with the look of chiffon. Why yogurt and chiffon? Well, everything about Devine has an authentic story that is rooted in Gretchen's history and experiences. It's a tradition in Puerto Rico to repaint your home for the New Year. Gretchen's grandfather always started right before Christmas with a Cuba Libre in his left hand, rattling the ice around to the rhythms that filled the air that time of year, and a paint stick in a bucket of rich white paint in his right. With every passing year, her family renewed the old and ushered in the new with drinking, dancing and rich white paint.

Chiffon dresses and quinceaneros

Then there were the quinceaneros celebrations of a girl's rite of passage into society as a woman. Gretchen's grandmother loved to sew, and she always created beautiful chiffon gowns for her to wear to all the quinceaneros she was invited to. The quality of the chiffon fabric's luminosity gave those dresses a radiant softness, a sense of beauty and an air of celebration that Gretchen never forgot.

When she moved to America, one of her earliest and most memorable experiences when she arrived, strangely enough, was opening (there were no peel backs then) a little plastic container and discovering yogurt. Gretchen had never seen or eaten yogurt before. The yogurt's richness enveloped the spoon as she moved it about, and it instantly reminded her of her grandfather's paint.

If you can't find what you're looking for, make it

Time passed, and Gretchen eventually evolved into color consulting. After several common, but nonetheless, unhappy experiences with other people's paints, Gretchen decided she would make her own. She had managed to create and customize all the colors she wanted, but they were always lacking something—she could never quite get the feel, and the colors were suffering from a lack of visual richness. Finally, Miller Paint^® took hold of her ideas. She told them she wanted her paint to "go on like yogurt and look like chiffon." The first time she tested what is now Devine Color Delicate Wall Finish^TM, she ignored the brushes and rollers set out before her and dipped her hand straight into the can, squishing it between her fingers and holding it up to her nose.

The paint had to feel as yummy as it looked. It had to be thick and rich in order for the colors to look radiantly soft. Gretchen wanted to impart that sense of beauty and celebration mixed with anticipation and renewal. And it did.

When she started color consulting, Gretchen was not aspiring to make paint someday. She was just happy to play with color. Every time she went to a client's home, she would get samples of their wood color, pillows and curtains and take them home. She would then create their color palettes at her home, not theirs.

Connecting belongings to color collections

The color collections Gretchen made proved to be the perfect background for their furnishings. How did this magic happen away from a client's home? She was making connections between their belongings and the purpose of wall color. This is how she began to understand that not every color gets to be on a wall, just like not every color should be on your lips. Out of thousands of choices in several fan decks, none of the colors connected with any kind of reason, or intelligence. So, Gretchen tossed the fan decks out and began to make her own colors, following the wisdom of a woman.

Her color creations had to make natural surfaces-like hardwood floors and cabinets—burst with radiance. She developed colors that had warmth, colors that could be the size of billboards without overpowering a space. Every color you see in the Devine color palette has gone through a home test process.

It's not just about color; it's also about finish

It took a disaster on a client's wall to realize that paint color and finish are also woven together physically. That's when Gretchen realized it was time to make paint in fabric-like finishes, and it had to be rich like yogurt.

The first 42,000 were filled by hand

Shopping at Costco^® one day, Gretchen and her husband stumbled upon a new product called Margarita in a Bucket^TM. The margarita itself came in a recyclable plastic pouch, so that when you were done having a good time with your Margarita in a Bucket^TM, you could break down the cardboard box and toss the pouch in the recycling bin. It was just so simple, and it made for responsible clean up. Gretchen began to ask herself why paint couldn’t come in this type of packaging, too. No more need to lug, store or deal with paint cans, especially when she looked at the tons of test quarts sitting in her garage!

The idea for the Mini-Paint Pouch^TM was born, a handy little recyclable paint sample that everyone could use with ease. But there was a huge problem. There was no one in the paint industry with the imagination or facilities to realize this idea. So, Gretchen her family and her friends filled the first 42,000 Mini-Paint Pouches^TM by hand. That's the equivalent of one semi-truckload!

No one in the paint industry had seen or done anything like squeezable and recyclable color before. Gretchen knew very quickly that Mini-Paint Pouches^TM were going to improve the way her clients realized perfect color possibilities in their home. She had no idea that it would change the paint industry forever.

Fingers that place and spread each drop

There are six gorgeous and unique colors in the rainbow: yellow, green, red, purple, blue, and orange. These colors are timeless, trend-proof and perfect, and in nature they exist in harmony without monotony, and contrast without conflict^TM.

When Gretchen began her color consulting business, she struggled with traditional fan decks and numbered paint chips—they never really seemed to look like what ended up on the wall. She would remix and remix the paint. She also began to wonder where the colors and perfect color relations she loved from nature - the yellows, greens, reds purples, blues and oranges - were.

With that in mind, she took the six gorgeous colors of the rainbow and began creating Devine Color's 12 unique palettes. By neutralizing and transforming the original six, she created more supporting palettes: Pacific Trail Mix^TM, Pebbles and Creams^TM and Espresso Blends^TM. And then by enhancing the original six, she created Devine's leading palettes: Valley Vineyards and Spices^TM, Cool Grasses and Evergreens^TM, Natural Blondes^TM, Desert Lights^TM, Silver Skies^TM, Ocean Tide Pools^TM, Sweet and Hot Beans^TM and Woven Tattles^TM.

Instead of fan decks or paint chips, with fingers daubed in paint, Gretchen went to work creating handmade palettes with real dried paint on them. She wanted people to be able to choose between true colors, and not mere representations, so that they'd know exactly what they were getting into.

The only handmade artist's palette in the paint industry

As a result, Devine Color has the only handmade artist's palette in the paint industry, and they're handmade for a reason—so that you can see our paint's true colors, recognize the ones you love and realize them in your lives. We at Devine Color are committed to helping you live with nature's perfect colors and coordinate the colors you love with the colors you have.