Profile: Chuck Stewart

Take a look at the color of the garment you’re wearing right now, and feel that garment’s texture. Chances are, that color and feel were developed at Tumbling Colors in Raleigh.

Owned and operated by North Carolina native Chuck Stewart, Tumbling Colors develops colors and finishes for a variety of clothing manufacturers -- from top design houses such as Louis Vuitton down to the two-person start-up jeans-makers Raleigh Denim. Stewart’s work is just another example of the spirit of innovation at work every day in North Carolina.

Colors developed by Stewart brighten garments in the top New York showrooms. They catch the eyes of shoppers in all the major retailers. Those colors have gone straight from the Raleigh lab to the runway and have even ended up on the front page of The New York Times.

Tumbling Colors is a resource for the textile apparel and fashion design industries that, in Stewart's words, "allows for the what-ifs and the why-nots and the why-can't-we?"

Describing what the company doesn't do is sometimes easier than describing what they do: They don't cut and sew. They don't make fabric. They do create color standards and dye small batches, sometimes with only a swatch of old fabric sent by a designer as a color guide. They also create textures by washing fabric with everything from pebbles to golf balls. Think of a pair of brand new jeans that look like they're distressed and battered. They probably were - deliberately so -  and they probably came from Tumbling Colors.

The way Stewart sees it, textile manufacturers can’t afford to ignore color.

“Color, in retail particularly, is what will encourage the consumer to stop and touch a garment,” he says. “Color is what moves people to reach out and go, 'Oooh, I like that.' Color is what moves fingers, and it's pretty; it's fun.”

You’ll find touches of N.C. State University red throughout Stewart’s office, but he’s more pragmatic when it comes to playing favorites.

 “My favorite color,” he says “is whatever my customers order.”

Textiles are a heritage industry in North Carolina, and Stewart would not be who he is today without that background. But Stewart also embodies the knowledge-based approaches that are transforming heritage industries across North Carolina.

Born the younger of two boys, Stewart was raised in Concord where his father was superintendent of dyeing for Cannon Mills Plant 6. The elder Stewart worked at Plant 6 from the time he graduated from N.C. State University in 1949 until his retirement in 1985. The younger Stewart inherited a passion for textiles from his father and from his summer jobs at Cannon Mills.

After earning a Bachelor of Science in Textile Chemistry from N.C. State in 1977, Stewart obtained a Master of Science in Textile Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1979. In the years that followed, he enjoyed a diverse 25-year career in textiles that took him from Copenhagen to Kuala Lumpur to China. He spent extensive time in Central and South America and Mexico, but he always found himself back in North Carolina.

"When we started the business, we wanted to start it here," he says of Tumbling Colors. "It's home. "

In his time away from North Carolina, the textile industry that was once a staple of the state's economy suffered, and manufacturing moved offshore. In 1999, Stewart recognized the need for a facility to do the basic research and process development to support the design and apparel industries, since that type of facility was no longer available here.

Ten years later, Tumbling Colors is still going strong. With a new facility in downtown Raleigh, Tumbling Colors has a student internship program in partnership with N.C. State. Graduates have gone on to careers in the fashion industry in New York, London and Hong Kong.

The Tumbling Colors warehouse provides incubator space for new textile and apparel companies. This allows Stewart to share his 30-plus years of experience with fledgling companies and help them avoid some of the potholes and hidden dangers that lurk for small textile businesses.

His advice for aspiring entrepreneurs? “Never stop learning.”

Stewart is proof of his own advice. Currently he's back at N.C. State, working on a doctorate in color and color theory through the College of Textiles.