The Story Behind the 3mL Colour Tube
When is giving you less getting more?
We have had some pushback/misunderstanding around our 3ml Colour Tubes. With some people saying other companies giving you 15, 25 or even 30ml. Why do we only give you 3ml in each tube. There are many reasons, but first and foremost we are looking to give you maximum value, so a paint that does not go off, a paint you can use 100% of, a paint that never needs remixing.
Unless you are brush painting your car or trying to fix something way beyond what touch up paint should, you will never use 30ml of touch up paint on one car. It is much more likely 30ml will go off and be thrown out due to air space in the bottle or it will become so badly separated it will not remix.
We did our 3ml tubes based on our experience of using bottled touch up paint on a commercial basis, we used pipettes to get it out of the bottle. We found a couple of .3ml pipettes was almost enough to go right around the average car, or at least do a heavily chipped bonnet. 3ml is 10 times this amount of material. So the whole idea of Colour Tubes started at trying to cut out the bottle and just use the paint straight from the pipette.
Initial prototypes we sealed the paint into a small pipette for storage. The light bulb moment for the Colour Tube happened over coffee, looking at a sugar stick.
Something else we found along this journey, when paint is in a small container with minimal air getting to it, it never dries out. This is particularly true of water based paint, which if left between 2 pieces of plastic stays wet almost forever. We then also discovered our water based paint never separates, another issue we were having with solvent paint. There are a couple of bleeding tints that may stain the tube, but this is over time and easily kneaded back in before opening.