Our Story

Two links in the chain, not six

We buy rugs directly from the workshops in India that make them, and sell them to you. That's the whole business. Everything else follows from it.

Why that matters

India has been making the world's finest handmade rugs for five hundred years. The craft travelled with the Mughals, settled in the flat country along the Ganges, and never left. Today the belt running through Bhadohi and Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh is the largest carpet-weaving cluster on earth. In Jaipur they tuft. In Panipat they weave flat.

What India has never had is a short route from the loom to the living room.

A handmade rug typically passes through a local agent, an exporter, an importer, a distributor and a retailer before anyone puts it on a floor. Every one of them takes a margin, and every margin is added to the price you eventually pay. None of them touched the wool.

The weaver doesn't see that money. Neither do you — you just pay it.

We cut the chain down to two links: the workshop, and you.

What a hand-knotted rug actually is

It's worth understanding what you're buying, because the differences are real and the words get used loosely.

Hand-knotted is the slow one. Warp threads are strung on a vertical loom and the weaver ties every single knot by hand, row by row, tamping each row down before starting the next. A large rug is months of work for several people. The density of those knots — counted per square inch — is the honest measure of quality, and you can see them on the reverse. That's how you tell a real one. A hand-knotted rug outlives the person who bought it.

Hand-tufted is faster. Yarn is punched through a stretched backing cloth with a hand-held tool, then locked in place and finished with a secondary backing. Still made by hand, still made one at a time, but weeks rather than months — which is why it costs a fraction of a knotted rug and why most of what people own is tufted.

Handwoven and flatweave have no pile at all. Woven flat on a loom, reversible, light enough to pick up and shake out. The dhurrie is the everyday rug of Indian homes, and it has been for centuries.

We also sell machine-made rugs, and we label them plainly as such. They aren't artisan pieces and we don't pretend otherwise — they're durable, washable, affordable floor covering, and sometimes that's exactly what a kitchen or a child's bedroom needs. What we won't do is sell you a machine-tufted polypropylene rug with a story about craftsmanship attached to it.

The wool

Good pile starts with good fibre. Much of our wool is New Zealand wool — longer staple, whiter before dyeing so colours come out truer, and springier underfoot, which is why it recovers from furniture dents instead of staying flat. It's shipped to India and worked there. We also sell jute and jute-cotton, which are coarser, cooler and entirely different in character: less a rug you sink into, more a texture you lay down.

What handmade actually means for you

Two things, and we'd rather say them up front than field the emails later.

Your rug will not be identical to the photograph. Yarn is dyed in batches, and dye lots vary. Patterns are worked by eye rather than printed. Two rugs of the same design, made by the same hands, will differ slightly — and a rug made by hand will differ from a photograph of a different rug made by different hands on a different day.

Your rug will not be exactly the stated size. It's finished under tension on a loom and it relaxes when it comes off. We quote a tolerance of ±3%, which on a 160 × 230 cm rug is about five centimetres.

Neither of these is a flaw. They're the evidence that a person made it. If you want perfect repeatability, you want a machine-made rug, and we sell those too.

How we buy

We buy direct, in small quantities, from workshops we deal with by name rather than through an agent who deals with them on our behalf. That's slower and it doesn't scale particularly well, which is precisely why most retailers don't do it.

Who we are

Rug Craftworks is a trading name of Bloom Technologies Ltd, registered in Hong Kong.

Questions about a particular rug, or about the workshop that made it? Email support@rugcraftworks.com — a person reads it.