Is there such a thing as too much colour choice?

By Jason Scrivens, sales director at Swift Frame.

‘Any colour you like, as long it’s black’ – that was Henry Ford’s famous summary of the aesthetic options available on his Model T, the world’s first mass-market car.

For years, if fenestration had a similar slogan, it was ‘any colour you like, as long as it’s white.’

The vast majority of the windows manufactured and sold in the UK were white PVC-U.

It wasn’t totally unheard of to see other finishes – woodgrain effects and other options existed, but they were much rarer than they are today.

Since the turn of the millennium, however, that’s completely changed. The choice available in all aspects of home improvement has rocketed.

Today, people see aesthetics and style as much higher priorities than they did 20 years ago, when windows and doors were viewed as far more practical purchases.

That’s led manufacturers to produce products in a vast array of different colours, foils and finishes – in the hope that however wild a customer’s imagination, they’ll have something to fit.

Suppliers across the industry now proudly promote the fact that can supply windows in a virtually unlimited range of different shades.

But personally, I wonder if our fixation with colour has now gone a too far.

Firstly, I think the demand for it has been often overstated. Certainly, there are more consumers asking for colour today than there were in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

But by a big margin, the most popular window finish in Britain today is still white.

What’s more, of the colours that are sold, most aren’t the hot pink and fluorescent oranges you sometimes see in marketing material, but very safe, familiar greys.

So while the zany shades might look good in a Tweet or an Instagram post, demand for them is actually extremely low.

Secondly, being able to provide frames in such a wide range of different finishes – especially given you’ll probably only get one order for bright purple bi-folds in a lifetime – adds complexity to your manufacturing process.

Given the enormous disruptions we’ve all faced since 2019 – the impact of Brexit, COVID lockdowns, materials shortages, price rises, an energy crisis and so on – I think we can all agree unnecessary complexity is something no-one needs.

At Swift Frame, we choose to take a different approach. We don’t just supply white windows – far from it. We offer a range of colours. But we offer colours we know consumers will buy.

Surely it’s much better for us as an industry to closely watch how consumer demand changes, and offer a smaller range of shades and finishes based on what people actually buy.

In doing so, we could make our lives much simpler – and only miss out on the tiny number of orders installers receive for colours radically outside the norm.

Here at Swift Frame, we offer a range of products, including flush casements we manufacture in house, in a variety of colours.

Mellow Oak, anthracite grey and rosewood are among these, and we find that our range more than suits our customers’ expectations.