If there's one thing that distinguishes the REDD brand, it's our color stories—painstakingly reconstructed anecodes about Robert Redd's life, based on evidence and accounts contributed both by him and the people he called friends. Maybe you've checked them out our Adventures in Color page, or read one of them on the hang tags that accompany our knit shirts. If that's the case, and you want to learn more about the Legend of Robert Redd, then we've got good news: Following several months of additional research, our team is preparing to roll out a new round of updates to the old stories, featuring a more in-depth look at Robert's life and times.
For now, throughout the next few posts, we'll lead you through a few examples of what's to come. Drawing from sources as diverse as photographs, blueprints, and Robert's old college-era notebooks, we've assembled dramatizations of key events in his life—and found a color pair to match. In a folio containing Robert's accounting ledgers and other financial record books, for example, we discovered an unusual document: a carbon copy of a cancelled check, issued by Milton Hershey to the White Star Line for a first class stateroom on the RMS Titanic.
Portrait of Milton Hershey.
Robert Redd had visited Hershey in Pennsylvania in 1913, a year after the maiden voyage of the ill-fated luxury liner, to discuss the foundation of a philanthropy trust. During his visit to Hershey's company town, Redd remarked that the enormity of the chocolate entrepreneur's achievements was testament to the value of honest, diligent effort. "Just look what a man can achieve," he is said to have remarked, "with a strong work ethic, a can-do spirit, and a refusal to quit." Hershey had shaken his head, laughing, and told Robert not to discount the role that luck plays in good fortune. It was his wife Kitty's illness, after all, that had led Hershey to cancel their reservation on the doomed ocean liner the year prior. A minor disappointment, Hershey said, but just as instrumental to the endurance of his ventures as his many years of hard work. As Redd left, Hershey gave him a copy of the room deposit check as a memento of their conversation.
We've rendered the account with the colors Chocolate and Ocean Blue, thus representing the Hershey success story: a mixture of industry and serendipity.
