John has worked at John Smedley for over 37 years, starting here in 1979, taking retirement from his role as Head Colourist in 2008. During that time John became the resident expert on all things colour, developing his own unique hues.
Working with the design team John would develop new Merino shades combining base colours to establish a “recipe” for a brand new shade. The first stage of this required John to blend Merino fibres by hand to create a sample for review, to create this, strands of Merino fibre would be separated out at very specific quantities. For example, to create John’s highly popular charcoal grey he