How milk, cookie and coffee are turned into a stocking
Skin tones instead of Fashion Colors
25 years ago, Bauerfeind was the first manufacturer of medical aids in Germany to offer fashionable colors for its compression stockings. Since then, the new Fashion Colors have always been launched at the beginning of the year. This year, our Product Management decided on three new skin tones.
“Our medical retailers requested that we include more skin tones in our color portfolio for VenoTrain micro and VenoTrain soft. This allows them to supply every customer with a perfectly matching product,” Astrid Basson explains. Milk, cookie, and coffee are now available until the end of January 2022. Together with cream, caramel, amaretto and espresso, patients will have seven skin tones to choose from. But how do the stockings get these colors?
As early as April of the previous year, experts start thinking about the colors for the following season. “We follow fashion trends, collect requests from our medical retailers and have a look at what other manufacturers are offering,” Katharina Heinrich, Marketing Manager, explains. Then Pantone cards are used to select different shades of the chosen color. After that, it’s the turn of our colleagues in the Dyeing Department: “In our laboratory, we create the dyeing recipes for the requested tones and conduct trial dyeing. In theory, we can blend any color,” says Menelaos Kouloudis, Dyeing Department Team Leader. After every round, we check whether the color result on the stocking and the silicone top band match perfectly. “Most stockings are white when they are knitted. That makes the dyeing process easier. We also have a lot of experience with our standard colors and know how the knitted fabric and the silicone top band respond to dye,” the dyeing expert explains.
In the past, muted red and purple tones were very popular with our patients – like our Wild Berry. That’s why this color will remain in our range this season. The most popular Fashion Color of all times was “Shade”, a dark gray, from 2014. And because it was so popular, it is now part of the standard range as “Anthracite”.
