Reading Mr. Dodge's blog I can't help but notice the similarities between Napster and the company I started working for about a year ago. This of course does not bode well for this little startup called Access Color, being a first-of-its-kind company.
A brief synopsis: Access Color mixes wall and house paint in thousands of different colors and bottles it into 2 fluid ounce jars (enough to paint a couple square feet), and the result is a color sample that can be brought home from a paint or hardware store and painted onto a wall to test that color in the real world. This saves people from the guesswork of holding a two inch square color chip against the wall to try to imagine what it will look like. At the paint store I used to work at we made them in house and they sold like crazy so my boss decided he'd start a business to sell them to other paint stores. However, it hasn't turned out to be the cash cow he thout it would be.
We bottle Benjamin Moore brand and Pratt & Lambert brand colors because these are the brands sold at small mom and pop hardware and paint stores, the idea being that they're more flexible than the big box stores and more willing to make room on their sales floors to display our product. This model works, but just barely. We're learning more and more that the best thing for us would be either to sell samples to Home Depot and Lowes, or else sell samples directly to BM and P&L so they can redistribute them to the mom and pop stores. The latter would be preferable because those paint manufacturers already have established bulk distribution chains.
That's where the similarities between Napster and Access lie. Those big companies are hard nuts to crack and we're just too small to make it work. Napster came along and showed the music business that online digital distribution was not only possible but also extremely cheap, and that's kind the stage Access is at now. Benjamin Moore in particular want's nothing to do with us, they don't see the benefit of selling tiny amounts of paint. Then Napster shut down and along came Apple iTunes to broker authorized sales between the music companies and the music buyers, which is the direction Access is trying to go. We're working on deals with other manufacturers to bottle their product and send it back to them so they can redistribute it. The problem is that other contract packaging companies my try to do the same thing and for the first time we'd be facing competetion. Now the music companies are showing signs that they want to nix their deals with Apple and open their own online music stores, and already Access Color's business is being threatened by Benjamin Moore making their own samples (though they only produce 260 of the 3,262 colors in their catalog).
I'm not complaining. A decade from now there will be 2 oz paint samples being sold in every paint and hardware store in the country, and those bottles probably won't have our logo on the label but hopefully we'll be remembered for our innovation. We didn't invent the paint sample and we aren't making a huge profit selling them, but at least we did create a market for them, the way Napster created a market for online music delivery.
Just thought I'd share the wave of dejá vu I got reading that blog.
