Curated Colors

My name is Tony Piloseno, and I am the founder, owner, and head designer of Tonester Paints. When I was in college, I worked a part-time job at Sherwin-Williams, and I began to fall in love with paint. It’s literally in every home, exterior, cars, everywhere, right? Moving into color and I design, I was learning how to develop paint colors, using different base products, creating my own formulations, and working with clients on how different colors emote in different spaces.

After graduation, I started Tonester because there were a few issues in the paint industry that I recognized and thought I could solve. For most companies, there’s an overwhelming choice of color options. There’d be 2,500 color options, and people wouldn’t even know where to start. With Tonester, I offered one product in three different finishes, with a limited palette of only 40 colors. It was originally geared towards the retail customer, but as the brand has evolved, we’re now catering to design-oriented spaces.

I consider it an art. The colors I have the most fun creating are anything mid-tone and below. I love making colors that actually have color, and I’m a really big fan of creating dark and moody colors, similar to ink tones. When you walk into a space and you see those colors, that’s what’s creating the impact.

I follow other designers and other material, and when I see something that I resonate with, I’m able to replicate that same sort of tone and color within my paint. That’s essentially the process, making moody colors with an impact that are inspired by other types of materials, to make it all coordinate into one.

I like to work with designers or brands that I’m going to have genuine fun with, where it doesn’t feel like work. Where we can organically share ideas back and forth. A good example of that was the showroom for Veronese in Paris. I’m very good friends with Ruben Jochimek. He let me pick the colors and have fun with it, and we were on the same page the whole time. Same thing with M2L, a project we just did for Miami Design Week. The owner, Tasha Manes, gave me the vibe she was looking for, and it was such a cool design that it was just super easy. When I’m working on a collaboration, I want to make sure that everyone’s going to have fun and that it’s not going to cause me stress.

The worst thing as a creative person is when you have to create something where you’re not passionate about the product or the project. You procrastinate. You’re like, I don’t want to do this. The product itself ends up becoming really bad and inorganic. I only like to do things that I’m going to have fun doing because there’s a lot of other stuff I have to worry about as an entrepreneur. I’m not going to take time to work on a project where it’s not going to be fun for all parties.

We’ve had to learn how to communicate on social media. We try our best to correct things digitally. I do all the editing and color corrections myself to get it as close as possible to the way it’s going to look in a home. But even if the color on screen is corrected for every phone or laptop, when you get the paint in your space with your lighting and your other material and textures, it’s still going to look somewhat altered. It’s my job as the business owner to educate people on that sort of process and why that happens.

That’s why I am very, very big on getting customers to order our peel-and-stick samples before buying the paint. First of all, they’re quick and easy to ship. We send them out the same day, and customers get them in the next few days. And it’s a no-mess way to see how the color is going to look in your home. They’re about nine inches by six inches, which is a decent amount of area to see how a color is going to look. There’s no adhesive–they use little suction cups on the back, so they’re eco-friendly and you can move them around. And we have them all produced in Milan with the actual paint, so they’re going to be the exact color and tone as when you put the paint on your wall. We sell a couple hundred a day all over the U.S., Canada, and Europe. People love them, and it just makes things easier for me and the client.

There’s no way to tell what that’s going to look like in your house. And it’s not even paint. It’s ink. I remember at the paint store, we would have customers come in and say the paint color you gave me is not what it looks like on this chip. So I’m just trying to resolve issues like that. Especially with a newer brand like Tonester, you have to be as accurate as possible.

The person who would use Tonester is someone who genuinely cares about their interior. For a lot of people, paint is overlooked. They put their money into furniture or decor, and the paint is the last thing they ever look at. But my brand is for people who put paint on their wall and consider it part of the space, almost as they would with a piece of artwork.

When you buy a piece of art, you want to know about the artist, the story. It’s the same for furniture and other design elements. You want to know the story behind who made it, the design process behind it, the thought, and the emotion that was evoked to make the end product. That’s the same thing I have integrated for paint in Tonester. It’s another talking point in an interior space.

When you get paint from a big box retailer, it’s overwhelming. It’s a commodity. There’s no art, thought, or emotion put into it, like Tonester does. And, you know, we’ve been to all these design shows and met all these great designers. It’s such a cool element when you get to see and meet people who have the same thought process as you, but with a different product.

Tasteful, elegant, and emotional. Those are the feelings I want to invoke right off the bat without the client or the user even thinking about it.

I like working with designers, so whenever a designer is working residential or commercial and can utilize my paint with their concept, super awesome. And I love the interiors of residential homes, the intimate spaces where people are themselves, if you get what I mean. And getting into the commercial aspect of it, I love when you walk into a well-designed lobby or restaurant, especially in Paris and New York, and you’re surrounded by it. It’s very dramatic. Very intimate. Maybe that’s the best way to put it–the most intimate space possible is where I envision tones or colors having the most impact.

We have two really, really awesome projects happening in 2025. Are you a music fan at all? Do you happen to know who Frank Zappa is?

I’m working with a design company called Original in Berlin, and we are redoing his old Hollywood Hills home it into a giant recording studio. You know, Frank Zappa has some pretty trademark colors, like the kind I gear Tonester around — purples, greens, very, very dark and inky. They’re going to be bespoke colors specifically for the home, and the entire exterior is going to be my famous color, Storms in Paris. And it’s 1950s, Mid-Century Modern to the peak. So that’s going to be a really, really dope project.

Then the second project is collaborating with a few other designers to have a showroom for Milan Design Week. I have to come up with specific new colors for that project. But that will also be happening in April when Salone is taking place.

We’re also working with Uchronia.  Julien Sebban is a very famous designer in Paris, and he is doing an installation at Mason and Objet, so we will be providing the paint and custom colors for that in January.

And we’ve been talking about color the whole time, but now we’re getting into different finishes and durability. Tonester Paint has always been high quality. But over this past year, I also developed designer ceramic finishes in a matte and a pearl finish, which you see in a lot of high-end projects. It’s super durable, it levels itself out, and it’s mixing that element of the most beautiful finish you could have paired with the color.

My biggest advice is to follow what’s the most organic. A lot of people get overwhelmed. They don’t know where to start. And it holds them back from being that full-time creator and showing the world what they have to offer. What I’ve done, and this has worked so well for me, is to take the first idea you have for a piece of content or design, whatever it is. That idea is the most organic, the one that naturally came from me. It’s not fake.

Then it gets into consistency. Taking that same sort of process and doing it over and over again. It took a while for Tonester to evolve into what it is today. But it wouldn’t have done that if I weren’t consistent every day trying to create new content and get my messaging out to people.

You really have to have the heart to be consistent with it and be organic. You don’t want to copy anyone. You don’t want to overthink it. That’s going to separate you from everyone else and help you build that audience

It sounds cliche, but that is really the way, if you want to create your path and your vision for whatever life you want to live and whatever you want to design and create, you have to play it that way.