Revel means to take great pleasure or delight in something, often with a sense of boisterous enjoyment or festivity. It can also refer to engaging in noisy, lively festivities or merrymaking
Meet Gretchen Schauffler, A Revel With A Cause
Gretchen's journey with color began in the backseat of her parent's car in Puerto Rico, perched on the red Naugahyde seat of her father's shiny black Chevrolet Impala. With no seat belts to hold her back, she slid from window to window, entertaining herself by watching the world through the chrome-trimmed glass she still wishes existed today.
On those sunrise-to-sunset drives, she fell in love with light—watching the sky change color every evening, the ocean glitter, palm leaves transform into giant feathers, and flowers become beads.
These vivid "life illusions" shaped her earliest color memories—her true, mad, deep loves. She calls them her "color baggage," which she brought along when she moved to the Pacific Northwest.
There, she stood out like a lime-green thumb in a world of hunter-greens, cobalt blues, and cranberry reds. Her baggage craved burnt corals, spirited limes, crystal cyans, and bottomless indigos.
It wasn't until she became a mother that she made it her mission to make "herself" her home—pulling out her color baggage and using it to create a space alive with her true essence. And then, something remarkable happened.
She went from being a lime-green thumb to stepping into her limelight—with a bucket of paint.
If Puerto Rico taught her about the sovereignty of light, the Pacific Northwest taught her about the sovereignty of shadows.
Like Puerto Rico, Oregon was green all year—but these trees and ferns diverged into thousands of shades she'd never known. The gray, woolly sky she once resented became a filter, revealing hundreds of subtle, lucid hues breaking through the shyness of gray. Making room for these new color experiences, her possibilities grew.
She channeled these feelings into art—vibrant collages of women at blissful moments. The joy was contagious. Her work sold at galleries such as Gunnar Nordstrom in Seattle, White Bird Gallery in Cannon Beach, and Clarksville Pottery in Austin. The Bellevue Art Museum curated one of her pieces.
Painting became her vehicle for belonging, growth, and expansion. She distilled color harmonies from her art, creating glazes and custom palettes. She turned walls into giant canvases, using the seven colors of the rainbow—like seven musical notes—to harmonize spaces with the colors people unconditionally loved, thus recreating the color wheel like a playwright with what she describes today as her "colorwright process," which ultimately became Devine Color, Color Therapy From The Northwest: paint that "went on like yogurt and looked like chiffon."
Her journey as a Boricua Latina entrepreneur began by blending her background in art therapy, architecture, fashion, and graphic design into the powerhouse brand Devine Color. The brand took the paint industry by storm with a feminist perspective—putting women in charge of their own color experiences with tools and formulas inspired by cosmetics. The color principles she uses to transform homes also empower people to take charge of their lives, emotionally and otherwise. She changed how paint companies market and sell color today.
Nine years later, Valspar acquired Devine, and Gretchen served as a brand consultant. After a five-year non-compete starting in 2015—and the Sherwin-Williams acquisition and subsequent end of Devine Color—her next chapter began.
During those five years, she dove into meditation, unlocking new creativity, joined the board of the Alzheimer's Association, Oregon Chapter, and developed "Color With Benefits"—a color protocol for memory and dementia care implemented in Oregon's Ronald McDonald Houses.
In 2018, while waiting out her non-compete, she launched DIP—Design Is Personal—stylish, customizable DIY home improvement products that soon earned five-star reviews and were sold across major retailers.
When her non-compete ended in 2020, it coincided with the pandemic, seismic social shifts, and the close of her second Saturn Return.
Her Devine Color journey had taught her to use the rainbow and a bucket of paint to synchronize and harmonize any home.
The leg of her Color Baggage journey taught her about harmonizing life itself—using the same principles to trust in synchronicity, embrace memory, experience, and intuition, and take leaps of faith toward her fullest potential.
Color Baggage is a journey, a creative path, and a painting ritual. It's an embodiment of color experiences and relationships that become one with your soul through resonance and harmony for a reason: to color your world with a beautiful vision of the life you are destined to live. And reveling in your personal revelation. Gretchen created her bucket of paints to intentionally prepare you for this journey and help you awaken the desire for what already belongs to you.
Today, Gretchen is writing about her extraordinary color baggage journey—a story full of serendipity, plot twists, and life lessons that helped her master intuition, navigate uncertainty and give birth to new dreams. And she promises to overshare it all.
Like Alice, Dorothy, and Santiago, she was led right back to where she began, discovering this profound truth:
"Where your heart is, there your treasure will also be."— The Alchemist.