CLEVELAND – Color can add excitement and increase consumer demand for products from computers to appliances to building products. Remember the rush for avocado and harvest gold kitchen appliances in the 1970s and red appliances more recently? While manufacturers need to respond to current trends, changing colors as consumer tastes change can come at a huge expense. Adding paint lines or changing colors for short product runs can be a costly gamble. Prepainted metal offers a broader range of color without the cost.

Any color designers can dream up is possible with prepainted steel and aluminum coils. If pink is the new black this year, manufacturers can follow the trend economically by outsourcing painting to a coil coater. Coil coaters can even provide stylish options such as the look of brushed steel, polished copper, wood grain, fingerprint proof surfaces and more.

Not only is the manufacturer able to introduce new colors quickly, the metal often has a better quality coating. Paint and pretreatment processes used by coil coaters can be a much higher quality than most in-house operations. That’s because the coil coating process paints the uncoiled steel or aluminum edge to edge, and often on both sides, with a consistent coat thickness.

Manufacturers can be trend-wise without risking profit margins by turning to a metal coil coater for color variety.

Prepainted metal can be very cost effective for fabricators of painted steel sheet products because it requires no in-plant painting either before or after fabrication. It eliminates the capital burden of paint facilities as well as painting costs associated with the preparation, handling, spraying and baking or drying operations.