Perfect Saturation: Not Just for Fine Wine

Concrete is basically an excuse for me to be a chemist of sorts.  Everything revolves around the capabilities of the mix design.  Some mix designs are great for counter tops, while others are great for thermals. The type of mix depends on the thickness of the final product: counter tops are almost always 1.5” thick, which means they are heavy! Angle 33 Wine Thermals need to be light enough for portability, but thick enough to employ the laws of thermal mass. That requires a fine balance, but we expect that with such a niche product.

Once the mix design is dialed in, the fun starts: it is time to play with color.  Coloring concrete is an art in itself. It requires the use of pigment—and the pigment particles are smaller than the concrete particles—a critical thing to know when you are talking about color saturation. The amount of pigment is dependent solely on the amount of concrete in the mix, but adding (or removing) water can influence the outcome. There are certain ratios of concrete/color that can’t be exceeded.  But beyond that, you can combine colors in all kinds of different percentages to achieve new colors or shades.  If you want to know more about the process of coloring concrete, check outConcreteNetwork.com.

Our original color test for our current wine thermal offerings was a slab of 84 different shades of reds, browns, blacks and other earthy tones. We then narrowed it down to two shades of each of the five colors that we offer, and asked friends and family to weigh in on which they liked best.

I’m an entrepreneur because I have a problem.  I can’t sit still very long and I never run out of ideas. It is not acceptable to let my business go stale, mainly because I am not wired that way.  Being able to play with color helps me funnel some of that energy into something productive. Coloring concrete is one of the most enjoyable parts of my job.  It is so exciting to come up with a new color because it allows our product development team to feed the creative process and generate new ideas.  In this way, we improve and expand.

I am always open to suggestions about new colors. So if you are reading this and are just dying to have a thermal in some particular color, let me know—I’d love to have a reason to run somewhere that isn’t in circles. Let’s get our hands dirty and maybe come up with a best seller.

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