Every season a buyer sends us a range plan with eight colours on it, drawn up the way you would pick paint: a swatch card, eight ticks, done. Then the plan meets the way fabric is actually made and sold, and half the colours quietly fall off. Nobody did anything wrong — the buyer just planned in colours while the mill sells in dye lots. Since this conversation happens weekly on our desk, here is the whole of it in one place.
What a dye lot actually is
Most upholstery fabric is piece-dyed: woven grey, then dyed in a batch. One batch — one dye bath — is a dye lot, and two lots of the same article code are never guaranteed to match exactly. Temperature, time and chemistry drift a little between baths, so "the same grey" from March and from September can sit visibly apart when two chairs stand side by side. Within one lot, the shade is consistent; across lots, it is close. That distinction drives almost everything else in this note, including why we cut a full order's upholstery from one lot wherever we can.
Mesh behaves differently and mostly better. A lot of chair mesh is made from solution-dyed yarn — the colour is in the polymer before the yarn is extruded — which is why mesh holds colour well and varies less between batches. The trade-off is choice: solution-dyed palettes are narrow, which is one reason mesh chairs the world over are black, grey and a handful of accent colours, while woven fabric can chase almost any reference you hand the mill.
Per-colour MOQ: the math that trims your range
A mill does not sell "fabric" — it sells a minimum cut per colour. So a 1,000-chair order in two colours is two comfortable fabric buys, while the same 1,000 chairs across eight colours is eight small buys, several of them below the mill's minimum. At that point you either pay an upcharge, buy more fabric than the order needs, or drop the colour. This is also where running colours earn their keep: black, dark grey and a navy that the mill dyes continuously can be bought in small quantities at standard price, because the mill aggregates demand across customers. The exotic terracotta cannot. A workable rule of thumb: your high-volume colours can be anything the mill runs; your low-volume accents had better be running colours, or they will cost like custom ones.
Custom colours and the lab-dip loop
If a colour is not in the mill's book — a brand colour, a retailer exclusive — it goes through lab dips: the mill dyes small trial pieces, you approve or correct, and the loop repeats. Each round takes time, and two or three rounds before sign-off is normal, so a custom colour adds weeks to a first order, not days. Two disciplines make it work. Approve the dip under an agreed light source — D65 daylight is the usual reference — because a colour matched under warm office lighting can miss badly in a daylit showroom. And keep the approved master swatch physically on file, both sides; it is the arbiter when a future lot is questioned. We hold the master for every colour we run on a buyer's program, alongside the article and rub-count records we covered in our note on Martindale ratings.
Planning a range that reorders cleanly
The pattern that works, across most of the office and mesh task programs we run, looks like this. Anchor the bulk of the volume — usually 60 to 70 percent — on two or three running dark colours that the mill will still be dyeing in five years. Put your personality into two or three accent colours, and accept that accents rotate: when one underperforms, you swap it next season without touching the anchors. Resist the eight-colour launch; it splits your fabric buys, multiplies your dye-lot exposure, and leaves you holding slow stock in the colour that did not sell.
Reorders are where colour discipline pays or punishes. A reorder lands in a new dye lot, so chairs from the new batch will sit next to year-old, slightly faded units in the same office. Close is usually acceptable; what is not acceptable is discovering the mill discontinued the colour. Before you commit a colour to a multi-year contract program, ask the mill — through us or directly — whether it is a book colour with a future or a seasonal item. We flag this at range-planning stage because the fix afterwards is a forced re-match, lab dips and all, on a deadline.
What we put in writing
On a colour-sensitive program we record the mill, the article number, the colour code, the approved master swatch and the dye lot used on each order — so a question two years later has a paper answer. Fabric is also the layer where shade complaints and wear complaints get tangled, so the rub count and composition sit in the same file. It is unglamorous, and it is the difference between a range that reorders cleanly and one that drifts a shade per container.
If you are planning a range, send us the colour count, the rough split and the markets, and we will tell you which colours are safe anchors and which need the lab-dip loop. Reach the export desk through the contact form, browse the full seating range, or see how a branded colour program runs on the OEM / ODM page.