Building the colour language that pulled Safari's range out of economy-coded blacks and navies.
What this is: a colour system that pulled Safari's range out of economy-coded blacks and navies. I redesigned a stalled, duplicated workflow into a repeatable pipeline, and built a colour matrix that revived plateaued shell platforms as new products — no new tooling. Two seasons of direction, delivered without holding a manager's authority over the team.
By 2024, Safari's range had narrowed into four colour territories — black, blue, grey, and teal. Reliable on volume. Recognisable on shelf. And, increasingly, a problem.
Two signals were arriving from the field at the same time. Dealer feedback came in from every market visit: the same request, every time — new colours. The trade was telling us the existing palette was tapped out. They needed reasons to refresh shelf, reasons to call a buyer back, reasons to pitch a Safari range against the brighter, more expressive competitors arriving in their stores.
The second signal was the consumer the trade was reacting to: a younger buyer who had stopped choosing luggage the way her parents had. She wasn't picking a black suitcase because it was practical; she was picking an orange one because it said something. And the brands she was picking weren't Safari — they were the ones offering eye-catching, expressive colour. We were losing her on the colour wall, before she ever read the spec sheet.
The category-level truth was that hardshell luggage is largely commoditised. The same polycarbonate shells, the same wheel systems, the same trolley mechanisms move through dozens of brands. Once shape and size are set, colour is the choice the consumer is actually making. Safari was still treating it as a finishing decision.
Colour Quest started from one position: if colour is the choice the customer is making, the brand has to direct it deliberately, season on season, with the same rigour we apply to form.
The brief said "refresh the palette." The factory said "not all at once."
The real constraint on Colour Quest wasn't creative budget — it was dye-development bandwidth. Each new shell colour is a substantial undertaking for the manufacturing partner: pigment calibration, sample cycles, batch-to-batch consistency tests, and final sign-off. And critically, polypropylene and polycarbonate don't share a master batch. The same colour identity has to be developed twice if it's wanted in both materials — two separate pigment formulations, two calibration cycles, two sign-offs — because the chemistry of the resins reads the same pigment differently.
So "eighteen new colours" isn't eighteen distinct identities. It's eighteen development efforts: nine PP master batches and nine PC master batches, with three colours represented in both materials and counted in each. The work isn't the colour. It's the colour in the material.
I phased these eighteen developments across two priorities. The split wasn't about importance; it was about perceptual impact per development slot.
Colour families Safari had never offered — the saturated tones that would visibly change how the range read on shelf. Developed first, because the perceptual shift from a new family is larger than the shift from a new tone within an existing one.
Extensions and refinements of families already in the Safari range — lower risk, faster to calibrate against known reference points, and able to ride on the visibility the P1 colours had already opened up at retail.
The discipline was sequencing: don't spend the factory's first cycle on safe extensions; spend it on the colours that change the consumer's read of the brand. Safe extensions get the second cycle, when the shelf has already moved.
The deck that carries the direction exists because of a less visible piece of work that happened first: I redesigned how the colour development effort itself was structured.
Before any colour can be developed at the factory, the proposal has to clear an internal gate — stakeholder review with PMs and brand leadership, who decide whether to commit factory capacity to the direction. The deck that goes into that room is the artefact this workflow exists to produce. Get the deck wrong and the colours never get made.
When I took ownership of Colour Quest, the starting state of the pre-approval work was three streams running simultaneously — trend research and Pantone mapping, screen and master-file calibration, and visualisation prep for stakeholder presentation. Everyone touched every stage. No one owned any of them. The output was duplicated effort, broken handoffs, and colour proposals that arrived at stakeholder review without a finished brief behind them. The system was failing before it produced anything.
I redesigned the workflow before I touched a swatch. The work had to move in one direction, not three — each stage owned by the capability best suited to it, each handing a clean, signed-off output to the next.
My title was Design & Development Manager — but the other two on this work weren't my direct reports. The work happened because the structure made the right thing easy and the wrong thing visible, not because anyone was assigned to me. The deck is the artefact. The pipeline is the work.
What happens after the deck is approved — the actual factory handoff, the Pantone specification, the master-batch development — is a separate discipline. That work is covered later in the case study.
The core of the system is a framework I built to stop colour decisions becoming taste arguments. Every tone in the palette has to do at least one of three jobs, and the strongest do all three.
Each tone has a role: shelf impact, emotional resonance, and digital storytelling.
A colour direction is only as good as the read it sits on. Each season of Colour Quest opens with trend trees — colour families pulled from automotive, footwear, fashion, and interiors, then tested against what's actually possible in PP and PC at scale. The discipline is the translation, not the trend-spotting. A colour that looks beautiful in a fashion editorial often fails in injection-moulded PC, or photographs grey on a white background under retail lighting. The trees are a hypothesis; the palette is what survives the manufacturing test.
Eight colour directions anchored the SS25 read — each mapped from the ground up, showing where the colour was surfacing across categories and what it signalled commercially before it reached luggage.
| Trend family | Where it's surfacing | The commercial read |
|---|---|---|
| Sage Green Family | Fashion · footwear · automotive · luggage · interiors | The season's dominant earthy-calm neutral; sustainability-led |
| Aquatic Blue | Luxury interiors · men's suiting · automotive · luggage | Sophistication and depth — a considered blue, not the holiday default |
| Egg Shell | Luggage · automotive · tech · fashion | Timeless, understated; bridges modern and classic |
| Muted Gray | Fashion · tech · travel · hard luggage · automotive | Refined, unisex, sleek; particularly strong on hard luggage |
| Brick Dust | Interiors · tech accessories · clothing · luggage | Warm, earthy, bold — a standout accent |
| Ray Flower | Luxury automotive · footwear · tech · watches · clothing | Optimistic mustard; the season's most consistent warm accent |
| Ivory Beige | Luxury cars + interiors · luggage · footwear · tech | Class and warmth; unisex and commercially dependable |
| Skyway Blue | Fashion · footwear · mobile phones · interiors · luggage | Calm, tranquil; a modern twist on traditional blues |
Preview · in the real build, drive this with the site's existing image component
Early exploration leaned on the trend forecasts directly — the saturated jewel end the category was moving toward. On paper, the direction was right.
Then the samples came back. The shells looked premium. The rest of the trolley did not. The in-house factory in the in-house factory, building for the Indian core market at the Safari cost structure, couldn't deliver components at the finish level a jewel-toned shell visually demanded. A premium shell wearing economy fittings doesn't read premium; it reads disappointing.
I recalibrated toward softer, more contemporary tones — colours the whole product could sustain. The colour the consumer sees has to be a colour the whole trolley can carry.
Every hardshell trolley is made up of four touchpoints that can each carry colour independently: shell, wheel, beading (the rivet line), and zipper. Most brands set the shell colour and let the others default to black. I built the matrix so every season has a finite, validated set of combinations across all four. I costed each combination, signed off the component pairings, and handed the range planner a buildable set rather than a palette to interpret.
Year two evolved from a single palette into five mood territories — each anchored to a distinct emotional energy, each holding a set of tones that share a reading speed. The point isn't five palettes; it's one range that speaks to five different consumer moods at the same time. The matrix sits underneath all five, so a tone from one territory can pair with a component colour from another and the system stays coherent.
The delivered set: eighteen colourways — nine in PP, nine in PC — across fifteen named colours. Three colours (Harbour Blue, Flintstone, Fossil) run in both materials as separate master batches; Solstice Yellow and Bright Yellow share one formulation under two names, one per material.
Once the deck cleared internal approval, the factory handoff began — and a different discipline took over. The pre-approval work was about building the case for a direction. The post-approval work was about translating that direction into colours that would actually arrive on the shell at the saturation, finish, and tone the brand had signed off.
Specifying a colour is not the same as receiving it. Polycarbonate shell forming stretches the material as it takes the mould; the colour pulls lighter and the white base under the pigment dilutes the saturation. The Pantone you hand in and the colour out of the mould are never the same tone — that's not factory failure, it's how the process works. And because PP and PC don't share a master batch, the factory receives the brief twice for any colour wanted in both materials — a PP Pantone list and a PC Pantone list, developed in parallel as two separate master-batch programmes.
I designed two manufacturing decisions into the brief to close the spec-to-shell gap before it opened:
The Pantone code given to the factory is intentionally a notch deeper or warmer than the finished colour the consumer should see. The forming process lifts it back. Matching to the deck swatch directly produces a shell that reads as a watered-down version of the intent — every season.
Each direction is briefed with a pair of close codes rather than a single target — the pairs shown against each colour above. The factory samples both; the team picks the closer match in one cycle instead of asking for a resample. Built-in optionality upstream costs nothing; resampling downstream costs the launch window — typically two to three months from factory request to validated sample.
The most commercially direct test of the system: three existing shell platforms that had plateaued on e-commerce, reading dated and undifferentiated against a market that had moved on. Colour Quest answered not "what should the new shell look like?" but "what would it take to make the existing ones look new?" In each case, the answer was colour and combination — nothing else.
Colour-led revival has commercial logic that a new shell can't match: no new tooling cost, faster speed to market, and the new SKU inherits the listing reviews, search rankings, and retailer-relationship equity of the platform it sits on. A new shell would need eighteen months to earn what a re-colouring inherits on day one.
The same palette appeared across all three of Safari's channels — trade, e-commerce, and hypermarket — reviving plateaued shell platforms as new products and giving the brand one recognisable colour language across every surface a consumer encountered it on. The clearest evidence is the live search result — the Safari range as a consumer sees it today. The original Safari staples — black, charcoal, dark navy — sit alongside Astra Neo, Thorium Neo, Pentagon Pro, and Thorium Royale. The range reads as varied, current, and expression-led. It no longer reads as economy-coded.
The palette the consumer sees today is the direct output of the direction system. The shells are the same shells. The tooling is the same tooling. The difference is colour, combination, and the decision to treat both as a strategic system rather than a finishing choice.
Colour Quest's claim is specific: it turns colour from a per-SKU argument into a direction system that compounds. Each season inherits the framework, evolves the trees, and produces a tighter, faster, more distinctive range — without new tooling, without new forms, and without the resampling loops that come from under-specified colour briefs.
The shell revival results are the most commercially direct proof of that. Three existing designs were relaunched as new product on every platform, with reviews, search rankings, and listing credibility that a genuinely new SKU would need eighteen months to build. The range looked new because the colour system was new — not because the products were.
What travels is the method: a three-role test, a combinatorial matrix, a per-colour CMF brief, a manufacturing-aware Pantone specification, a sequential workflow with each stage owned by the capability best suited to it, and the discipline of building each season on top of the last rather than starting from scratch. That approach works in any category where colour is the primary consumer choice and the brand is still treating it as the last decision.
Hiring or curious —
ameer.tooba@gmail.com
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