X-Rite Pantone donates colour kit to FIT textile department
28 July 2026: Colour standards firm X-Rite Pantone and the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), part of the State University of New York (SUNY), have announced a partnership on digital colour education for apparel, footwear, soft goods and textiles.
X-Rite Pantone will donate colour measurement, quality-control and visual evaluation technology to FIT’s Textile Development and Marketing (TDM) department. TDM sits in the college’s Jay and Patty Baker School of Business and Technology.
What the partners plan to do
X-Rite Pantone said the gift covers a full textile colour management set-up: measurement devices, software and visual evaluation tools of the kind used by brand colour teams. The company said TDM students will practise moving colour from design samples through production data and supply-chain checks. The partners also said they will run joint industry research on digital colour use, brand-supplier collaboration, colour consistency and supply-chain practices.
“By partnering with FIT, we’re providing the knowledge and tools future designers and textile professionals need to align physical colour standards, spectral data, and digital workflows,” said Raj Shah, Vice President of Marketing at X-Rite Pantone.
Shannon Maher, Dean of FIT’s School of Business and Technology, said the college wants students to work with industry-grade tools. “Combining our TDM faculty’s deep textile expertise with X-Rite Pantone’s industry-standard colour technology gives our students a distinct competitive advantage,” she said in the release.
Why it matters for textiles
Colour mismatch still costs time and fabric between design rooms, mills and dye houses. X-Rite Pantone argued that shared digital standards can cut development loops and waste when brands, mills and manufacturers work from the same spectral data rather than physical swatches alone.
X-Rite Pantone, headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA has more than 800 employees across 11 countries. FIT, based in New York City teaches more than 8,000 students a year across art, design, business and technology programmes.
www.fitnyc.edu
www.xrite.com
