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the u.s. machine made rug industry
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Until the mid 19th Century, only extremely wealthy Americans could afford beautiful rugs. Ordinary people covered their floors with hand-loomed or braided "rag€VbCrLf rugs or floor cloths made from painted sailcloth. Rich people bought hand knotted Persian rugs that came to the U.S. via England.
That changed with the Industrial Revolution when machine woven decorative rugs became affordable for middle class people. Further developments in both tufting and weaving in the 20th Century made rugs available to virtually everyone.
19th Century Looms
In the 1840's, Erastus Brigham Bigelow patented the first steam-driven weaving looms in Lowell, MA, and the American carpet and rug industry was born.
Bigelow's steam-powered loom was followed in the 1870's by the Axminster power loom. Halcyon Skinner invented the patterning technology for Alexander Smith & Sons in Yonkers, NY.
Axminster technology dominated the rug and carpet business until after World War II.
Bigelow and Alexander Smith have gone through various incarnations, but still exist. Although neither company currently makes rugs, both are part of today's Mohawk Industries.
Until the early 1990's, the American carpet and rug business was considered a single entity, with the emphasis on carpet.
By the mid- 20th Century, tufting emerged as the dominant manufacturing technology and broadloom carpeting was the dominant product.
Machine made rugs took a back seat. Tufted rugs were relegated largely to inexpensive machine-washable products for the bath room or kitchen.
Axminster woven rugs from Karastan and a few others were fairly costly. Hand knotted rugs from Persia and later China were extremely expensive.
In the late 20th Century, weaving re-emerged as the dominant rug making technology and beautiful, decorative rugs became available to the middle and mass markets.
THE TUFTING REVOLUTION
In 1895, Catherine Evans Whitener, a young Georgia farm girl, made a hand-tufted bedspread for her cousin's wedding. It was the beginning of the tufting revolution.
Whitener's revival of this hand craft came only 50 years after Bigelow's steam-powered loom. It took another 50 years for tufting to become the dominant form of manufacture in the carpet business.
By the mid-1930's, tufted bedspreads were no longer made by hand. They were made on multi-needle machines that operated much like sewing machines.
Area rugs were fairly immune to the tufted revolution. Machine tufting had technical limitations in terms of patterns and colors. As a result, the tufted rug business has been largely confined to the washable small rug business.
Printing technology, however, has been making inroads into the tufted room size rug industry over the past decade.
Milliken introduced its Millitron jet-injection system of printing in the mid 1970's. It is now in its fifth generation. Millitron uses its system for both rugs and carpeting.
Other patterning processes such as Chromajet printing have come on-stream in the past ten years. They use computer-controlled jets of color to achieve virtually unlimited color and pattern effects on a tufted carpet base.
Beginning in 1999, Mohawk and Shaw have introduced rugs made with computerized injection-dyed technology. These products have been developed primarily for value-oriented markets with such applications as the juvenile, accent rug and washable rug categories.
MODERN RUG WEAVING TECHNOLOGY
CRT Wilton technology has allowed the American rug business to emerge from the shadow of the carpet industry.
Belgian machinery maker Michel Van de Wiele developed the computer controlled face-to-face Wilton machine in the early 1990's. The Carpet & Rug Tronic (CRT) machinery quickly spread through the rug making world.
CRT rug making offers several advantages related to speed, efficiency, color and pattern. Each machine is limited to a single creel, or group of colors, but several designs and sizes can be run simultaneously.
The term "face to face€VbCrLf refers to the fact that two mirror-image rugs are woven at the same time. (At the end of the weaving process,a rapier slits the two faces apart).
There are now over 1,000 CRT machines in place in the United States, Belgium, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, France and China.
A Van De Wiele machine costs well over $1 million. Once the equipment is in place, each can produce millions of dollars worth of rugs annually. Depending on fiber, the rugs retail for approximately $99 to $799 for 6x9 size.
North American CRT rug producers include Shaw, Mohawk, Oriental Weavers USA, Beaulieu Rugs (acquired by Springs Industries in early 2002), Orian and Canada's Carpet Art Deco. Many U.S. rug importers, even those known for hand knotted rugs, import CRT-made rugs from overseas.
The scope and power of the current revolution is demonstrated by the rapid improvements in CRT technology. In 1997, over 90% of production was on five- and six-color looms.
Today, new CRT equipment can handle up to 14 colors. By cross-weaving, more than 40 color shades are possible in a single rug. In 2001, over half of all rug production was in eight or more colors. Five-frame looms now account for less than 5% of the market.
Van de Wiele technology is closely related to developments in polypropylene fiber. Polypropylene is colored at the chip level and is usually used in continuous filament form.
In the early 90's Van de Wiele looms churned out millions of inexpensive "straight poly€VbCrLf rugs. Most were sold in discount stores for $39 to $79 in 6x9 size.
In the mid 1990's, the color assortment of the chips broadened considerably allowing for more sophisticated palettes.
Texture and hand of have also been vastly improved. New "soft-touch€VbCrLf polypropylene yarns are now coming onstream.
In the late 1990's, CRT machines were modified to accept spun yarns. This opened the doors for wool rugs made on Van de Wiele machinery. Staple polypropylene, with the aesthetics of wool, is also being used to a limited extent on European CRT machines.
In the United States, most products made on Van De Wiele machinery are in rug format. Broadloom carpeting is also made with CRT equipment. New Van de Wiele looms include wire-frame Wiltons and machines that duplicates the look of hand-woven sisal rugs. Still to come from Van de Wiele: new high speed Axminster equipment.
But CRT is not the only weaving technology
Karastan, which has made machine-woven Axminster rugs since 1928, has improved that technique over the years. Today, much of its rug production is run on proprietary Kara-Loc looms. In late 1999, Karastan also began making face-to-face Wilton rugs as well as importing Wilton weaves from Europe.
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CASE HISTORY:
Beaulieu, a U.S. Woven Rug Pioneer
In 1978, a young Belgian entrepreneur named Carl Boukaert arrived in Dalton, GA, the city that calls itself "the carpet capital of the world."
He founded Beaulieu North America and began making inexpensive woven polypropylene rugs in facilities formerly owned by E.T. Barwick Mills.
At that time, tufted carpeting dominated the American soft floor covering business. The people in Dalton thought Carl Boukaert was naive, or maybe even slightly mad.
By the late 1990's Beaulieu's rug sales were estimated to be over $100 million and the company was a dominant factor in the mass market rug business. By that time, Beaulieu had also become a major player in the tufted broadloom carpet business.
In 1988, Beaulieu entered the tufting business with the purchase of Conquest Mills. In 1991, Coronet was acquired by Beaulieu. In 2002, Beaulieu's woven rug business was sold to Springs Mills.
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