About Us
Quality Paint Products, Inc. is a manufacturer of disappearing dyes for architectural and high-performance coatings. We make the job of painting easier, faster, and more cost effective for your customers. Our company has operated as a family-owned business since the mid-1990’s and we continue to pride ourselves by offering the highest quality products with exceptional customer service. Our products can be used in a variety of applications and can be custom formulated to fit your needs.
How it began
In 1992, Victor Franer was painting a ceiling in his house while his wife kept pointing out spots he had missed causing him to make repeated trips up and down the ladder. The frustration of working over his head with the glare, shadows, and the white-over-white application triggered Victor, who was a retired 3M Company (MMM) chemist with 15 patents, to begin figuring out an easier way.
Relying on his 37 years of experience at 3M and his past work as the inventor of latex paint, Victor rented lab space and began to solve the problem. During the next four years he was able to engineer a paint with a dissipating tint. Soon after, “Color Guide” was patented, and Quality Paint Products, Inc. was formed.
We leased a building in Minneapolis and began manufacturing our own paint utilizing this concept. Our first product called “Ceiling Magic” was a ceiling paint that went on blue and dried to white within 24 hours. The product was quickly distributed to local hardware stores including Ace, Tru-Serve, and Hardware Hank Stores. Despite the lack of advertising and heavy competition from mass merchandisers in the Minneapolis-St Paul market, the paint was well received and became known as the “Magic” paint. Some dealers were skeptical at first, but quickly became believers after receiving favorable consumer feedback. Through “word of mouth” selling, demand for the product grew until the product was placed into the distribution system of two major hardware chains in the Midwest.
However, we quickly realized our growth potential would be limited unless Color Guide could be expanded beyond our own paint. We made the decision to shift our focus from selling paint, to licensing our technology to paint manufacturers. Selling the Color Guide additive directly to other companies for distribution allowed for a much further reach.
Ace Hardware was the first licensee in January of 2002 and introduced its first product “Simply Magic” in October of 2002, a ceiling paint that applied blue and dried to white. In September of 2003, “Color Guide” went international when Home Hardware Stores Limited, with locations throughout Canada, introduced “Color Guide” in their ceiling paint called “Ceiling Perfect”.
Since the early 2000’s, we have added additional technologies to tint elastomeric roof coatings, refractory coatings, clear poly urethane protective coatings, and other high-performance coatings. Today, our products are sold throughout North and South America. We continue to research and develop new products utilizing “Color Guide” and are working with numerous paint companies around the world to further this concept in their products.
