About Us

I am a retired marketing professional from a national organization. A few years after retiring (and spending like I was still employed), I realized that my money was going to expire probably before I did. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do about that when a friend suggested that I update other peoples’ leather furniture—like I had done with my own.

That’s when the idea for Turncoat™ came to me. Instead of me renewing one leather sofa at a time, why not share what I’ve learned so that others can replicate what I’ve done?

As I explained in my video (located on the Home Page), when I began the process of changing the look of my leather, there weren’t many options available. I spent months researching and experimenting until I found the right products and techniques. After that, there was still the issue of color. I wanted a color that wasn’t available—so I created it myself.

My God-given talent is that I have an eye for color. I can see a color and I can re-create it. I don’t have any explanation for it—it’s not something to be learned or taught. My daughter says that my eyes must have an extra cone (the cells responsible for color vision), and maybe that’s true. Whatever the reason, I looked to nature and to historic colors in creating the color palette for Turncoat.

Each color is hand-crafted by me, using formulas I developed. For my own furniture, I wanted a color that wasn’t sitting on the floor in every furniture store in America. In developing the Turncoat colors, I tried to bring that same element of uniqueness to the palette. Even standard colors such as black, will have an unexpected quality—Obsidian has a greenish tint, Black Plum has a purple cast, Ink has a charcoal tinge, and Pitch has a look of the abyss.

I tried to bring some fun into the colors as well. I love the colors of the liqueurs, Campari and Absinthe, so I made versions of them. A friend asked for a color like that on the Oval Office chairs used in press conferences, so I created Oval Office yellow. Eugenia is a red named for a berry of the eugenia plant—and for my mom. Fillmore is a blue named for my dad and his leather recliner that he wanted renewed to the exact original color as his favorite chair. Mocha, Cappuccino, Avocado Toast, and Polar Vortex are nods to popular culture. Many others mimic nature, as with Oxford Blue which is also the name of the lavender-blue flower, and Storm Surge which looks like the Atlantic Ocean advancing onto Florida beaches. Creating and researching the historic colors, Turncoat Colors with a Past™, gave me such an appreciation for those visionaries who tried to re-create the colors of their world using plants and minerals. What I’ve learned through this experience of creating the Turncoat colors is that God loves color!

I hope you will love Turncoat’s colors too. If you have a suggestion for a color you’d like to see on our web site, please send a note to me at: caryl@turncoatleather.com.

Thank you for reading,

Caryl

P.S. As to why I chose the name Turncoat, the term turncoat refers to a change of allegiance. In medieval times, when English barons changed their fealty, their coats of arms would change from one lord to another. There are also stories in history where soldiers would turn the coats of their uniforms inside out so as not to identify with a particular army, and of people who changed the colors they wore when certain colors identified political parties or ideals they no longer believed. So turncoat just means a change in outlook or ideology or loyalty. I thought it appropriate that leather that turns its look from bad to good should be called Turncoat too.