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Furnetics Unlimited Ltd. today announced that the Hephaestus Group’s Pelage Programme has completed final trials on a seven-pattern coat repertoire for the four commercial Morphic templates offered under the Phenotype Renovations™ service line, coupled with a thirty-two-shade coat palette. Prior to this release, Morphic pelage limited in colouration, derived from the inspirational organism's most-frequent wild phenotype. The new pattern set widens the range of elective coat expression, allowing clients’ imaginations to more freely come to life. Every combination will be available on newly-commissioned designs from the first of February 2026.

“A coat is integral to the expression of self, an indelable mark a person carries with them for the rest of their life, always in view. Seven patterns is not, in the end, the number that matters; what matters is that our clients can dream bigger, and we can deliver.”

— Dr. Ines Marchetti-Roux, Chief Scientific Officer

What the pattern set covers

• Seven pelage patterns. Two are single-hue and require only a field colour; the remaining five are two-hue and require both field and mark. Each pattern is a distinct developmental pathway rather than a topical decoration. Encoded patterns are established at the follicular stem-cell niche and re-expressed with each cycle of the coat. The position-dependent regulation on which that establishment relies has been studied in model organisms since Lee and Schiefelbein’s characterisation of the WEREWOLF locus in Arabidopsis. This was early evidence that a small MYB-family regulator can commit an otherwise homogeneous population of epidermal cells to distinct fates on positional grounds alone.
• Thirty-two coat shades across eight chromatic bands. The palette runs from the warm cream and sand bands through ember, sable, and roan to the deep ash and pitch families. Each shade is stable under the standard indoor and outdoor illuminants.
• Persistence through the coat cycle. Pattern and hue are encoded together at the melanocyte-stem-cell niche in the follicular bulge, with heritability confirmed by long-read sequencing. Both are retained through the natural synchrony of the client’s coat cycle and require no scheduled maintenance beyond the standard structured follow-up. The pattern does not drift toward the wild-type baseline with age; the mark colour, in the two-hue patterns, may deepen fractionally over the first two adult cycles by an amount within a single band of the palette.
• Full compatibility with the four commercial Morphic templates. Every pattern is offered on Wolf, Otter, Vulpine, and Feline. Custom Morphic X designs will receive full palette and pattern support in the third quarter of 2026, subject to individual review.

The pelage lab

Below, a conceptual sample of every pattern in the new set, in every one of the thirty-two coat shades. Select a pattern to render the swatch under it; select the Field or Mark slot and then any shade in the palette to assign it. The two single-hue patterns render from the field colour alone; the mark slot dims and can be revisited when a two-hue pattern is selected. These presentations are for illustrative purposes only; final expression on the delivered coat is a composite of the pattern specification, adjacent design elements, and the follicular geometry of the parent template. These are not photographs.

Self Countershaded Mackerel Classic Rosette Saddle Tortoiseshell

Field Cinnamon Mark Espresso

Click the Mark selector button above the palette to see mark-colour compatibility with the current field and pattern. Hatched swatches are pairings unlikely to be supported by the current Phenotype Renovations™ technology, as they are too unnatural.

Existing clients

This iteration of our colouration processes are only available for new clients. At this time, pelage-reformulation follow-up procedures are not viable for post-procedural clients.