The Color That a Company Owns
A meditation on Tiffany Blue, Pantone 1837, and the legal feat of trademarking a shade of robin's-egg blue across the jewelry industry.
There is a particular shade of robin's-egg blue, formally designated Pantone 1837 (the year Tiffany & Co. was founded), that is owned. It is owned, specifically, by Tiffany & Co., now a subsidiary of LVMH. The color was registered as a trademark in the United States and most major jurisdictions during the late twentieth century. Other companies cannot use that exact shade in the jewelry category — or in adjacent categories where it could be confused for Tiffany — without legal consequence. The color is, in effect, a registered piece of intellectual property.
This is unusual. Colors are generally considered too elemental to be trademarked. The argument for the Tiffany trademark rests on the position that the specific shade has, through more than a century of consistent use in packaging, advertising, and retail design, accumulated so much specific brand association that consumers identify it directly with Tiffany. The mechanism is identical to the Burberry check or the Coca-Cola contour bottle — a visual element so consistently used by a single company that the law has agreed to grant it the protection of a trademark.
The Box. The Tiffany Blue Box, in which jewelry is delivered, is a piece of marketing collateral as carefully managed as any product in the line. The box cannot be purchased separately. It cannot be removed from a Tiffany location without a purchase. The box has, by industry estimates, an emotional value to recipients that exceeds the cost of inexpensive items inside it. A two-hundred-dollar silver charm in a Tiffany Blue Box is a different gift than the same charm in plain packaging. The box is the gift.
The LVMH Acquisition. In 2021, LVMH acquired Tiffany for sixteen billion dollars after a year-long acquisition saga complicated by the pandemic. The price reflected a substantial brand premium over Tiffany's underlying earnings — and a substantial part of that brand premium was the trademarked color. LVMH has subsequently invested heavily in updating the brand's positioning, partly to leverage the color across new product categories the previous management had not exploited.
The color stays the color. The box stays the box. The trademark stays the trademark. Pantone 1837 continues to mean Tiffany.
Disclaimer
This article is produced for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, a solicitation, or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All data cited reflects information available as of the publication time noted above. Market conditions may change materially between publication and when you read this. Past performance of any strategy referenced is not indicative of future results. Consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.
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