MEET GRETCHEN

How does a Puerto Rican girl Riding around in the back seat of her parents’ car end up in Oregon, selling paint out of the trunk of her car, navigating her way to the top of a patriarchal paint industry with her own rainbow of colors and transforming millions of lives with a bucket of paint?

Color Baggage History

Color Baggage is a journey, a creative practice, a paint ritual. It's an embodiment of the only color experiences that can color your world with a beautiful vision of life you are destined to live. 


2001—Gretchen Schauffler creates the cult paint brand Devine Color, Color Therapy From The Northwest. Her paint, known as "Go On Like Yogurt, and Look Like Chiffon," becomes a skyrocketing success and a catalyst in the American paint industry.

2007—Gretchen negotiates a deal with Sherwin-Williams.

2008—The stock market crashes, wiping out Sherwin-Williams’ acquisition of Devine Color.

2009—Gretchen sells Devine Color to Valspar Paint in a Search-and-Rescue Mission, consulting for the company over the next five years.

2015—She’s released with a five-year non-compete in the paint industry. Months later, Sherwin-Williams announced the acquisition of Valspar—along with Devine.

2017—Sherwin-Williams officially acquires Valspar and discontinues Devine Color. Gretchen becomes a board member of the Alzheimer’s Association and develops and implements Color With Benefits—a protocol for care facilities, including Ronald McDonald Houses.

2018—Gretchen launches DIP, Design Is Personal: DIY home improvement products. DIP became a five-star brand, sold online and at major U.S. retailers, including Target, Wayfair, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Walmart.

2020—Her five-year non-compete ends. COVID begins.

2022—She begins to write a book and creates a new brand based on the name of her book called Color Baggage. She gets her own tinting machine, begins to craft COLORWRIGHT™ paint formulations, launches CB Project Paint at Lowes

2025—She brings her version of Devine Color back to life at colorbaggage.com. 

 


A WOMAN WITH A COLORFUL PAST.

Gretchen's journey with color began in the backseat of her parent's car in Puerto Rico, perched on the red Naugahyde seat of her father's shiny black Chevrolet Impala. With no seatbelts to hold her back, she slid from window to window, entertaining herself by watching the world through the chrome-trimmed glass she still wishes existed today.

On those sunrise-to-sunset drives, she fell in love with light—watching the sky change color every evening, the ocean glitter, palm leaves transform into giant feathers, and flowers become beads.

These vivid "life illusions" shaped her earliest color memories—her true, mad, deep loves. She calls them her "color baggage," which she brought along when she moved to the Pacific Northwest.

There, she stood out like a lime-green thumb in a world of hunter-greens, cobalt blues, and cranberry reds. Her baggage craved burnt corals, spirited limes, crystal cyans, and bottomless indigos.

It wasn't until she became a mother that she made it her mission to make "herself" her home—pulling out her color baggage and using it to create a space alive with her true essence. And then, something remarkable happened.

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 all year—but these trees and ferns diverged into thousands of shades she'd never known. The gray, woolly sky she once resented became a filter, revealing hundreds of subtle, lucid hues breaking through the shyness of gray. Making room for these new color experiences, her possibilities grew.

She channeled these feelings into art—vibrant collages of women at blissful moments. The joy was contagious. Her work sold at galleries such as Gunnar Nordstrom in Seattle, White Bird Gallery in Cannon Beach, and Clarksville Pottery in Austin. The Bellevue Art Museum curated one of her pieces.

Painting became her vehicle for belonging, growth, and expansion. She distilled color harmonies from her art, creating glazes and custom palettes. She turned walls into giant canvases, using the seven colors of the rainbow—like seven musical notes—to harmonize spaces with the colors people unconditionally loved, thus recreating the color wheel like a playwright with what she describes today as her "colorwright process," which ultimately became Devine Color, Color Therapy From The Northwest: paint that "went on like yogurt and looked like chiffon."

Her journey as a Boricua Latina entrepreneur began by blending her background in art therapy, architecture, fashion, and graphic design into the powerhouse brand Devine Color. The brand took the paint industry by storm with a feminist perspective—putting women in charge of their own color experiences with tools and formulas inspired by cosmetics.

The color principles she uses to transform homes also empower people to take charge of their lives, emotionally and otherwise. She is a creator, an innovator that changed how paint companies market and sell color today.