Why Pantone escaped competition

Welcome to Legacy Beyond Profits, where we explore what it really means to build a business that leaves a mark for the right reasons.

Companies that own the ruler by which everyone measures truth build economic moats that product innovation alone cannot breach

Most executives obsess over product differentiation: better specifications, lower prices, innovative features that competitors struggle to match. They pour resources into manufacturing excellence while ignoring the invisible infrastructure through which their entire industry communicates. This product-first mentality creates brittle advantages requiring constant defense—competitors reverse-engineer innovations, supply chains commoditize components, and differentiation evaporates as patents expire.

How Pantone turned a chaotic product into global infrastructure

When Lawrence Herbert joined M&J Levine Advertising in 1956, commercial printing was drowning in confusion. Every shop produced different versions of the same color. Designers used poetic descriptions that meant nothing to manufacturers. Brands couldn’t get consistency across suppliers. The problem wasn’t chemistry. It was communication.

Herbert saw an opening: if he could standardise how the world described color, he could solve the chaos that no one else could even define.

From ink recipes to a universal language

By 1962, Herbert had transformed the ink division into the only profitable part of the company. The rest was failing, and he bought the assets for the equivalent of half a million dollars today. Colleagues thought he was rescuing scrap. He knew he was acquiring the chance to build a new global system.

He began hand-mixing colors in a small lab. Each color was given a number rather than a description. No “beige.” No “wine red.” Just PMS 185 or PMS 541. Designers initially hated it. Ink manufacturers saw it as a threat to their formulas and customer relationships. Most refused meetings.

Herbert kept going.

Why giving away the product created a perception monopoly

The key move was counterintuitive. He made his ink formulations freely available. Anyone could produce a Pantone color physically.

What he didn’t give away was the numbering system.

Competitors could match the pigments. They couldn’t replicate the language that connected designers, printers, and brands. By liberating the tangible product and owning the abstract standard, Herbert shifted competition from physical supply to perception control.

The workforce strategy that locked in an entire industry

Technical standards don’t spread because executives choose them. They spread because professionals are trained on them.

Herbert flooded design schools with free teaching materials and guidebooks. Students became fluent in Pantone before they ever entered the workplace. When they joined agencies and manufacturing firms, Pantone came with them. Switching away meant retraining entire teams and rewriting decades of accumulated habits.

The switching cost wasn’t money. It was institutional memory.

Turning standards into recurring, high-margin revenue

Physical ink became a commodity. The real profit came from being the gatekeeper of the measurement system.

Pantone guidebooks, licensing fees, digital libraries, and annual updates generated software-level margins. At its peak, Pantone earned more than three hundred thousand dollars per employee. Companies weren’t paying for pigments. They were paying for legitimacy inside the only color language their partners recognised.

How cultural authority reinforced commercial dominance

Once Pantone became standard infrastructure, Herbert added a cultural layer. The Color of the Year program, launched in 2000, began as a simple PR play. It became a global phenomenon generating billions of media impressions.

Pantone wasn’t just the technical authority for color. It became the cultural authority too. Challenging the standard now felt risky. Alternatives weren’t just incompatible. They felt illegitimate.

Governments eventually encoded Pantone colors into law. Flags in Scotland and Texas are officially defined using PMS numbers. A private company had become the arbiter of national identity.

The moment Pantone became too essential to replace

In 2022, Adobe removed Pantone libraries from Photoshop and Illustrator. Designers opened decade-old files and saw black squares where colors used to be. Their entire archive had been encoded in Pantone numbers.

Subscribers complained. Most paid.

Decades of work couldn’t be rebuilt. The dependency had become absolute.

What leaders can learn from Herbert’s long game

Pantone didn’t win because it made the best ink. It won because it created a shared language that the world adopted. Herbert played a long game built on patience, standards, distributed education, cultural authority, and relentless evangelism.

For executives aiming to build legacy and social value:

Products can be copied. Standards endure. If you want to escape competition, build the system your industry comes to rely on.

From strategy to legacy

Standardization advantages challenge the assumption that competitive moats require proprietary products. Pantone's achievement: Herbert made color formulations universally accessible, then built the only measurement system where that accessibility mattered. While competitors protected recipes through secrecy, Herbert created open infrastructure—and controlled the language through which that infrastructure operated.

This pattern repeats across industries. Nvidia dominates AI through CUDA becoming the universal development language millions of engineers learned. Mastercard wins by controlling payment standards that define valid transactions. In markets where products commoditize, enduring advantages belong to those who privatize the ruler by which industries measure reality. Herbert recognized that owning how people describe the world generates more durable advantages than owning what they describe.