Painting by Numbers: The story of Pigment

4 months.

That’s how long it took for us to settle on the name Pigment. Choosing a name isn’t easy, and there were plenty that got left on the cutting room floor. But how did we settle on “Pigment” in the end? It’s a question we get asked frequently.

We’ve always been drawn to the parallels between business and art. Both start with a vision in someone’s mind that evolves over time, and just as a piece of art is made up of a multitude of carefully selected and arranged colors, so too is every business.

Imagine standing in front of the Mona Lisa, or van Gogh’s Starry Night - any painting will do. Get as close as possible. What do you see? Individual brush strokes in a chaotic blend of colors. Take a small step back and you may see shapes emerge. But move back even further and there it is: the full picture, revealed in all its glory. 

Pigment makes this process possible for businesses - but they tell their stories using numbers and formulas, rather than brushes and paint.

Our name reflects two of the main goals we had when we established the business: 

1. Bring all business planning data, people, and processes into one place
2. Provide a stellar user experience to help organizations understand, manipulate, and tell stories with their data

A color palette for your organization

An artist begins, typically, by arranging all the colors they’re going to use onto a palette, before they begin combining them on the canvas. 

The equivalent in business planning is your data. But we saw first hand that many business leaders weren’t able to build a holistic view of theirs, thanks to siloed data, disparate teams, and complex processes. And as they scaled, these problems were exacerbated.

It’s for this reason that we’ve focussed so hard to ensure that Pigment can integrate seamlessly with all the different systems, data sources, and teams that a modern organization is host to. 

It’s only by building a detailed understanding of all of them that you can see the nuances and layers that make up your business - and then explore, experiment and make the best decisions about what's next.

Building vibrant experiences

The best tools feel like an extension of the body - and there’s no better example of that than a paintbrush in the hands of an artist.

Plenty of business tools - particularly in the planning space - are theoretically very powerful. But when there’s not enough focus put on user experience, they simply won’t be utilized to their fullest potential.

As an industry, we’re not often thought of as being colorful, exciting, or dare we say it, human. But we want to change that.

The way we set out to build Pigment was to allow our users to interrogate, manipulate, and to tell stories with the numbers in any way they see fit. And we’re constantly looking for ways to improve that experience - Pigment AI is a great example of that, and will give our users a brand new way of interacting with their data.

Looking forward

Just like art evolves, so do businesses. 

We know that the Pigment we build over the next five years will look different to the Pigment we see today. But we’ll always stay true to our mission and values, and keep adding color to everything we do.