Samplize: warm paint colors hit 69.4% of tested samples, deep warm tones growing fastest

The safe beige years are ending. Your customers still want calm, but they want it warm, tactile, and made by people, not machines. That pull shows up everywhere right now, from paint chips to Pantone's swatch books to the retail floor. Let me catch you up.

The deep cut

• Warmth is a strategy, not a shade. From Farrow & Ball plaster pinks to Aarke's analogue-film shoots, warmth is doing the persuading.
• Nostalgia sells the feeling, not the logo. The Light Phone borrows old form and current tech; Burger King's Boomer King borrows the look while screens replace the people.
• Scale the human moment, not the shelf. Laneige's Seoul flagship blew up its bespoke services to building size instead of stacking product.

Americans are heating up their walls

The clearest signal is in the paint people actually test. The Samplize American Paint Color Report tracked millions of samples and found warm colors now make up 69.4% of everything tested, up from 64.3% two years back. Half of American shortlists have no cool color at all.

The twist is depth. Warming did not mean lightening. As Samplize's Makenna Lutz put it, "the deepest warm tones grew fastest of all," roughly six times faster than deep cool tones. Think Farrow & Ball's Setting Plaster on one end and Benjamin Moore's Classic Burgundy on the other. People still want drama. They just want it to feel warm.

More color, still on purpose

Pantone read the same room and went bigger. It added 224 colors, its first expansion since 2022, signaling that saturated, high-contrast palettes are now the default rather than the exception.

The driver is Gen Z. Pantone's Laurie Pressman says they "move away from neutral palettes towards more impactful shades" to stand out in a "sea of sameness." Quiet-luxury blacks and muted tones are "losing their dominance." Worth noting: this is not maximalism for its own sake. Pressman calls color "an attitude," with meaning attached to each choice. Loud, but deliberate.

Warmth is a design fix, not a feeling you can fake

The trap is treating warmth as decoration. Aarke's Malin Gäfvert names it: "Minimalism only feels cold when it's empty of narrative." Her fix at Aarke is to pair precise product shots with images that show a human present, shot in ambient light, often on analogue film. The tension between the engineered and the everyday is the brand.

Same lesson in nostalgia. Chris Braden warns against using the past to hide the present. His example: Burger King's Boomer King nails the 80s and 90s look, but the warmth of that era came from people, and today's counter is an ordering screen. His better model is the Light Phone, which borrows old form and adds 5G. Borrow the feeling. Do not fake the substance.

Make the small thing big

Retail is running the same play in physical space. Laneige's Seoul flagship spans four floors, with a red tube spiraling from the lobby out through the roof. PlayLab's Jeff Franklin explains the logic plainly: "Skincare products are inherently small and can be eclipsed by their environments." So the store scaled up the intimate parts. Blend a Lip Sleeping Mask from 45 combinations. Match one of 150 cushion shades, then watch a robot make the compact.

Tropical Smoothie Cafe took a lighter version of this, treating "tropical" as a feeling rather than a place, carried across the room, the cup, and the screen. Even Nike, about to be dropped from the S&P 100, is leaning human. Its reset motto, "Create epic shit, make athletes better," bets that starting with real people beats starting with a spec.

Three questions for your team

• Where are we using neutrals out of habit, and would a warmer, deeper palette read as more confident without going loud?
• If we lean on nostalgia, what true thing about our product does it reveal, and where would a customer catch the contradiction?
• Which small, personal moment in our experience deserves to be the biggest thing in the room, the way Laneige scaled its bespoke services?