About
Shop Your Colors is run by Kathleen Olsen, who spent years not knowing why certain clothes didn't look good on her. She's a Soft Autumn. Once she found that out, the closet made sense: the pieces she reached for every day were in her palette, and the expensive mistakes were not. She built this site so that finding your colors is the beginning of shopping, not the end of it.
Before San Diego, Kathleen ran Sweet Table Chicago, one of the country's leading dessert-table design companies. Color was her job long before it was her wardrobe. Palettes, contrast, what reads warm and what reads cool from across a room: the same problems, whether the thing is a table or a person.
What the site does. Every morning it reads each retailer's public catalog, sets aside prints, denim and plain neutrals, and looks at every solid-color piece in stock. Each piece is scored against the twelve seasonal palettes. Four picks per season are chosen for the day, and the guides and inventory pages are rebuilt. Nobody edits the picks by hand.
How the matching works. Three things vote on each garment: the color sampled from the product photo, the distance between that color and each palette's swatches, measured in a perceptual color space rather than by eye, and what the retailer calls the color. When two of the three agree, the piece gets a score out of 100 for each season it suits. Below 70 it doesn't appear. "Core color" means 90 or above; "wearable" is 70 to 89. The dot beside each photo is the sampled color, and it matters more than the photo, because retailer photography is lit for the shot, not for you.
What it gets wrong. Sheer fabrics, metallics and anything shot on a colored backdrop can fool it. Retailer color names lie sometimes. The system is the standard twelve-season one; if your analyst uses a different one, the nearest season is a fair starting point, not a verdict. Hold the item to your drapes.
How it makes money. Links to retailers are affiliate links. If you buy, the retailer pays a small commission; you pay the same price. Commissions never affect which pieces are shown. No ads, no sponsored placements, and no tracking beyond an aggregate count of which palettes and retailers get clicked. Details on the privacy page.
The point of all this, in Kathleen's words: to help others find their colors, and fill their closets with clothes that make them look and feel fantastic.
