Finding the Great Garanimal of Go With

In the world of big decisions (like picking your family room’s paint color) and pricey, non-returnable considered-purchases (like choosing the new carpet to go with your new paint color), decorating resolutely ranks right up there on the top tiers of terror.

Okay, the truth is that most of us (even those of us who revel daily in creative realms) are more than likely to be reduced to quivering pools of shudder at the mere thought of picking colors for our own home. Imagine, given the challenges of room size, ceiling height and all the vagaries of natural and unnatural light, picking paint color and carpet that actually go with each other. What are the chances of that?

And, when you come right down to it, what does “go with” really mean? Now, to make matters more terrifying, the process of discovering “what goes with what” is neither condensed nor convenient. And while you might start your journey by spending a gajillion late night hours on a gajillion websites, your adventure has only begun. Because no matter how hard you try to convince yourself that you can match colors online – you can’t. Or maybe you can, but what you absolutely cannot do is convince yourself that you can. So you don’t.

Ultimately it all becomes peripatetic. You start by using your lunch hours, then your dinner times, and eventually your sick days (yes you do!) to run from paint store to furniture store to drapery store to carpeting store and back again.

And for all this running, your reward is lots of tiny, little, begrudgingly given samples and chips and swatches of variously colored carpet, wallpaper, paint and fabrics clutched in your sweaty hands and purse and pockets and bags – and “Oh-My-God, where did I put that orange and magenta-ish paint chip that goes with the hue we liked on Aunt Marsha’s ottoman?”

Yes, I have heard that conversation (and who would not have committed that word-for-word to memory?) and I have witnessed that journey.

So back to the running around and clutching of samples and whatnots. Like Judgment Day, there eventually comes the point when the creative question has to be answered: will that color paint go with that color carpet? And who has discovered the answer? Who has suddenly changed the game for all weary seekers of “go with”?

Martha Stewart

Not to mix brand references, but Martha Stewart has created The Great Garanimal of “Go With.”(Garanimals – you know, the famous children’s clothing line that uses sweet little babyish icons to show you how to match tops with bottoms, etc. Really, you didn’t know?)

Now, even the most confirmed decorator-phobe, can walk into Home Depot, go to the Martha Stewart Living Paint and Carpet Collections and choose from over 280 interior paint colors that are expertly matched to their best “go with” by cute little icons (apples, stars, etc). So if you truly cannot see the nuanced differences between Barely There Beige and Bright Morning Beige, you can simply match one apple (or star, etc) icon with another and voila! You have your perfect Go Withs.

But that’s not all.

MSL has taken those little MSL paint icons and put them on all her MSL carpeting…. So now you can also take your perfect paint Go Withs (walls, trim and ceiling) and using those angelic MSL icons, find the inarguably perfect carpet Go With.

And now you can go back to sleeping at night. Martha, the patron saint of keeping–it-simple, has tamed the terrors of creative Go Withs.

Has your brand?