About Gretchen Schauffler
Gretchen's color baggage journey began in the backseat of her parents' car in Puerto Rico, sitting on the red Naugahyde seat of her father's shiny-black Chevrolet Impala. Without seatbelts to worry about, she could slide around the back seat of that car, from one window to another, and entertain herself by watching the world through shiny chrome-lined windows she wished were still manufactured today.
During those sunrise-to-sunset car rides, she fell in love with light. She watched light paint a new sky every night, fill the ocean with glitter, and change palm leaves into giant feathers and flowers into beads.
These life illusions she recalls are the color memories and experiences that shaped her love for color and the shades she still truly, madly, and deeply loves. She calls them her color baggage, baggage she brought with her when she moved to the Pacific Northwest.
She stood out like a lime-green thumb in a mass-produced world of hunter-greens, cobalt blues, and cranberry reds. Her baggage had her craving burnt corals, spirited limes, crystal cyans, and bottomless indigos.
It wasn't until she had babies that she made it a mission to make "herself" her home by pulling out her color baggage and using it to color a vibrant and inspiring place that resonated with her true essence—not to be different but as an act of self-love. Something unexpected and remarkable happened next.
She went from being a lime-green thumb to stepping into her limelight with a bucket of paint.
If Puerto Rico taught her about the sovereignty of light, the Pacific Northwest taught her about the sovereignty of shadows.
Like Puerto Rico, Oregon was green primarily year-round. Except for these trees and ferns diverged into thousands of shades she had never known before.
The gray wooly blanket sky she resented became a filter, allowing her to see hundreds of lucid hues breaking through their shy gray nature. When she made room for these new color experiences, her color baggage grew with new possibilities. She turned these feelings into art: colorful collages featuring female figures at the height of a blissful moment.
Their reflection was contagious. Pieces of her art and heart sold in galleries such as Gunnar Nordstrom Gallery in Seattle, Washington White Bird Gallery in Cannon Beach, Oregon, and Clarksville Pottery in Austin, Texas.
She even sold a curated piece by the Bellevue Art Museum at their art show before she started using walls as canvases, creating faux finishes, murals, and paint colors from her art that became divine interventions in people's lives.
Painting became a vehicle of belonging, growth, and expansion for her. She distilled and blended paint color harmonies from colors in her art and created glazes.
She crafted custom colors with them and practiced anything she could get her hands on. She turned her walls into gigantic canvases and used the 7 colors in the rainbow, like 7 notes, to harmonize color palettes based on the unconditional colors people loved, which later became Devine Color, Color Therapy From The Northwest, With Paint That Went On Like Yogurt and Looked Like Chiffon.
Gretchen's professional success story as a Boricua Latina entrepreneur began when she poured her educational experience in Art Therapy, Architecture, Fashion Design, and Graphic Design to create a powerhouse cult brand called Devine Color, Color Therapy From The Northwest in 2001.
Devine took the paint industry by storm with a feminist perspective, putting women in charge of their own paint color experiences with color tools and formulas fashioned after the cosmetic industry, thus changing how paint companies market and sell paint today.
Her brand was acquired nine years later by Valspar Paint, where she held the position of brand consultant. She walked away with a five-year non-compete in the paint industry in 2015; Sherwin Williams initiated the acquisition to buy Valspar in 2016, which closed in 2017, and the elimination of Devine Color.
A lot happened in those five years. She began practicing mediation, which opened new channels of creativity and possibility, became a board member of the Alzheimer's Association, Oregon Chapter, and developed a color protocol called Color With Benefits, focusing on using color in meaningful ways to benefit memory, dementia patients, and caregivers, and implemented in the Oregon Ronald McDonald Houses in Oregon.
In 2018, while waiting for her non-compete to end, she created and launched DIP Design Is Personal, providing high-quality, stylish, customizable DIY home improvement products.
DIP Design Is Personal became a 5-star review DIY home improvement brand three years later. DIP is sold online at designispersonal.com and across all major U.S. retailers, including Target, Wayfair, Home Depot, Lowes, and Amazon.
The end of her non-compete in 2020 coincided with the exiting of her Second Saturn Return, an earth-quaking global pandemic, and catalytic social events.
Her Devine Color journey taught her how to use the rainbow and a bucket of paint to synchronize diverse elements in a home and harmonize them with color.
Color Baggage is the leg of the journey that taught her how to harmonize her life by becoming the rainbow itself and using the same principles to trust in meaningful synchronicity: remarkable memories, experiences, and desires with timelines of their own that trigger her and her intuition into taking leaps of faith or decisive action and move forward confidently towards her potential.
Making her dreams real in unexpected ways and real journeys more exciting than their destinations.
Gretchen chose the family-owned 97-year-old Diamond Vogel Paint Company as her paint manufacturer due to their mad engineering paint-making skills and commitment to honoring her new synchronized-to-harmonize COLORWRIGHT™ paint formulations.
She singly creates, shakes, and tests on walls before they go on yours.
Her new COLORWRIGHT™ Paint Formulations are one-of-a-kind and stunningly beautiful. She called them Seashell Matte and Silkworm Satin because they reflect versions of true love as she remembers them from those sunrise-to-sunset years. Honoring ancient Spanish forts, limestone Churches, and Quianna silk dresses she wore in the 70s.
Color Baggage has a journey, a transformative creative method, and a painting ritual to step into her limelight with a bucket of paint. It is the first step to a path and destination that is not the end of the journey but the beginning of a future she creates for herself and leaves behind for others, like nature does, to be recycled, reimagined, or reinvented.
The same color principles she uses to change homes also change lives by emotionally empowering people to take charge of their experiences, color or otherwise.
She is currently writing about her extraordinary color baggage journey packed with serendipitous moments, events, and life-changing twists that helped her master her intuition and keep moving forward during an unprecedented period of uncertainty to birth new dreams destined to come true. Which she will be oversharing.
Much like Alice, Dorothy, and Santiago, she was led right back to where she started and experienced the same profound truth; "Where your heart is, there your treasure will also be."
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