Search your library
by colour.

Why colour is how you actually remember things.

Ask a designer to describe something they saw six weeks ago and almost nobody leads with the SKU. They lead with the colour, then the material, then roughly what it was for. That is not sloppiness, it is how schemes get built. You work outward from an anchor, a rug, a stone, a fabric the client fell for, and the rest of the room gets pulled from it. The instruction designers actually give each other is “pull the colours from that rug”, not extract the hex.

The sourcing around it is much less romantic. One designer described having “25 tabs open just trying to track down specs, pricing and availability for a single sectional”. Another put the working split at “35% designing and 65% logistics”. Nobody got into this profession for the second number.

Almost every sourcing tool ignores the colour part, because a database would rather be organised by category and supplier. So the single most reliable thing you remember about a product is the one thing you cannot search on. VADE indexes colour as a first-class property, alongside category, supplier and project.

How a save becomes a searchable colour.

Save anything

Right-click any supplier or product page and VADE keeps the URL, the title, the price and the image together in one record. The Chrome extension, iOS Shortcut and email capture all feed the same library, so it does not matter whether you found the piece at your desk or on a train.

The palette is extracted

Dominant colours are pulled from the product image and resolved to named colours, so you can search “sage” as easily as #9CAF88. Multi-coloured pieces carry several values rather than being flattened to one average, which is what stops a patterned kilim from resolving to mud. Paints skip the packshot entirely and become a flat tile.

Search, filter, correct

Search by swatch, by hex or by name. Results sort by colour distance and can be filtered by category, supplier, project or collection at the same time. When extraction gets a fabric wrong, and on a busy print it sometimes will, edit the palette by hand and the correction sticks for good.

Your taste, finally searchable.

Designers think in colour first. But most sourcing tools, and every spreadsheet, force you back into folders and file names. VADE indexes the one attribute you actually remember. Save a brass sconce, a bouclé in oat, a deep-green emulsion, and later pull them all back by tone rather than by the supplier you have half-forgotten.

It is the part of VADE that nothing else in the trade quite does, and it works across everything you have saved from the open web rather than a closed catalogue. If you have been using a pinboard for this, our comparison with Pinterest covers why a pretty image with no URL, price or supplier attached is where most of the time goes missing.

Where it fits in a real scheme.

Say the anchor is a rug. The client has signed off a hand-knotted wool piece for a first-floor drawing room in a Victorian terrace, and everything else now has to sit against it. You lift two values straight out of the rug photograph: a deep clay at #9C5A44 and a chalky off-white at #EDE7DC.

Paste the clay into colour search, filter to Seating, and the library comes back sorted by colour distance. Two years of saving, eleven suppliers, fourteen results, of which perhaps six are genuinely in range. Two of those six are from brands you already hold a trade account with, which the vendor card tells you without opening a new tab.

Run the off-white against Paint and the results arrive as flat tiles rather than tin photographs, so you can judge four whites against each other instead of squinting at four product shots lit in four different studios.

Twenty minutes, not an afternoon. Then you order samples of the six, because that is the only way this decision ever actually gets made. The job of the search was to make the sample order six items long instead of sixty.

What this is not.

Screen colour is not sample colour, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. There is real variation between your monitor, a client’s laptop and the actual room at four in the afternoon, and no amount of hex precision fixes it. Anyone telling you a screen can stand in for a memo sample is selling something.

Colour search is a retrieval tool. It finds you the six things worth ordering samples of instead of the sixty. The decision is still made with physical samples, in the actual room, in the actual light, and it always should be.

The same caveat applies to matching a hex to a paint colour. Hex is an additive screen model and paint is not, so a hex will get you to the right family and no further. We have written about how to bridge that gap properly.

And VADE is not a procurement suite. There are no purchase orders, no invoicing, no payments and no scheduling here. It is a sourcing library that happens to be searchable by colour.

What else it unlocks.

Because the palette is already extracted, it carries through everywhere else in the library. AI moodboards compose from the colours in the products you actually picked rather than from a template. Every vendor card shows the palette range that supplier occupies in your library, which is a fast way to see who you go to for warm neutrals and who you go to for saturated colour. A client-ready board can be ordered by colour so a scheme reads as one thing rather than a list. And it all starts with one right-click on a product page.

Questions, answered.

How does searching by colour actually work?

When you save a product, VADE reads the product image and extracts its dominant palette. You can then search your library by a hex code, or by clicking any swatch on a saved card, and results are sorted by colour distance with the closest match first. It is the difference between scrolling hundreds of thumbnails and asking your library for everything in one exact greige.

Can I search by a specific hex code?

Yes. Paste any hex (for example #7A8B6F) into the colour search and VADE ranks every saved product by how close its palette is to that colour. Useful when a client has signed off a palette and you need to source to it.

How does VADE handle paint colours?

Paint saves render as a flat colour tile with the hex printed on the swatch and the brand, range and finish overlaid, because designers browse paints by colour and not by thumbnail. The tile is the product. The printed hex is contrast-checked so it stays readable on any colour.

Is colour search usable if I am colour-blind?

Every colour in VADE carries its hex as text, not just a swatch: on paint tiles, on the swatches you click to search, and in the saved-product detail view. So you can work by the number even when the hue is hard to distinguish.

Do I need to tag colours manually?

No. Palette extraction happens automatically in the background when a save is enriched. You can refine a save in the review queue if you want, but the colour data is there without you maintaining it.

What happens if the extracted colour is wrong?

You correct it, and the correction sticks. Extraction reads the dominant colours out of the product image, so a heavily patterned fabric, a styled room shot or a badly lit packshot can pull the palette somewhere odd. Open the save, edit the palette by hand, and every future search ranks it against the colours you set rather than the ones the image suggested.

Can I search by a paint code rather than a hex?

Save the paint from the manufacturer page and VADE keeps the brand, range and code alongside the extracted colour, so you can search either. Searching the code finds the tin. Searching the hex finds everything else in your library that sits near it, across fabric, seating and lighting.

Is colour search included on the free plan?

Yes. Saving, organising, palette extraction and colour search are free forever. Solo is £12 a month and Studio is £29 a month for up to five seats, and those tiers add moodboard volume, the full set of layouts and studio-branded client links. You can cancel from billing settings whenever you like.