Top 3 Concerns of Many Rug Customers
When working in the rug room, we hear many of the same fears over and over again and yet by the time most folks leave, they have some peace of mind. Are these some of your concerns?
1. How will I ever decide from all of these rugs?
I think this is my all-time favorite concern. Folks walk up to the rug piles with their dimensions and fabric samples in hand, leave out a heavy sigh and proclaim they don’t know how they’ll ever narrow down their choices with so many rugs in our rug room to choose from.
Honestly, our rug piles can look daunting with over 25 different styles of rugs to choose from and sizes ranging from 2’x3′ to 10’x14′.
With each customer, we explain that as we look together we will go through all piles that are of interest to them, starting from the top and flipping down to the bottom of the pile. As we bring the rugs back down again, ones that are of interest will get rolled and laid on the floor for customers to compare side by side.
Within about 10 rugs, we normally see a customer’s pattern emerge. Certain rugs call out to certain people. The attraction begins and by the time we get to the bottom of the pile, we can usually see what grabs the customer’s fancy. Going back down through the pile helps the individual to cement their likes and to reject those first “puppy-loves” that one quickly realizes they do not want to spend the next many lifetimes with.
In my over 20 years working with these rugs, I have never had a customer who didn’t purchase a rug because they couldn’t figure out what they liked.
2. My room layout is so unique. How can I make a rug fit?
We encourage customers
to play with different designs,
different layouts and different sizes.
Our rugs vary in size from 2’x3′ to 10’x14′ but our rugs are made by hand, each and every knot tied by hand, designed by artisans. I think in our entire inventory I would only find a few rugs that hit the exact sizes of 2’x3′, 3’x5, 6’x9′ or 9’x12′. Since an artisan knots what the design needs and how their skilled hands flow, these rugs always go by what we call the -ish measurement. “These rugs are 4’x6′-ish” and honestly, some rugs we don’t know where to pile. Certain designs warrant that the artisan craft unique sizes that cause us angst when trying to keep the piles orderly and neat but allow the rugs to fit into many unique spots.
The best way to figure out a unique layout is to start to play. We encourage customers to take rugs home on approval to try out, to play with different designs, different layouts and different sizes. And when the truly unique size, like entry ways to old 1700’s Pennsylvania farm houses with their 6’x12′ measurements come into play, we can always work with customers to special order their rug. Special orders require patience but definitely help to fit Bunyyad rugs into even the most unique of spaces.
3. I love the light colored rugs but I’m so scared of staining them. They aren’t just something you throw away when dirty!
“Quality You Desire, Fairness Artisans Deserve.” You’ve probably see our tagline throughout our promotions and website. When people are paid fairly, they can focus on their work. They can use good quality wool shorn from a live dhumba sheep with the extra fat packs on their tails, giving the wool an incredible amount of lanolin. They can use good quality dyes that are formulated to last and they can dye the wool with time-honored and time-consuming methods that allow the dyes to completely permeate the wool.
So, that first time you drop a glass of red wine on your ivory colored Bunyaad rug, you’ll see how the oils in the wool repel the stain and allow simple soap and water to clean it up. And if you don’t find that red wine spill on your ivory rug until let’s say a month later, then you’ll see how a little soap, water and up to 40% bleach can take out the stain without harming any of the colors.
All of us in the Bunyaad Rug Room at Ten Thousand Villages in Ephrata can tell you that one workplace hazard for us is that your floors are never bare again. All of us own at least one Bunyaad rug and many of us won’t quite admit to how many are actually on our floors (because honestly, once you get one Bunyaad rug into your house, it graces the space like nothing else and puts up with whatever your life dishes out in terms of use and abuse). Here is the short list of what I’ve dropped on our rugs of all colors (light and dark) in our house:
- Red Wine
- Spaghetti Sauce
- Tumeric Potatoes
- Creamy Kale soup
- A three wick candle burning for over 6 hours (wax was EVERYWHERE!)
- Doggie business (liquid, solid, combination there within, sometimes undisturbed, sometimes only found once stepped on and squooshed nicely into the pile)
- Dark colored soft drinks/pops
- Chocolate Milk
No, I don’t live with the Little Rascals but I do live on my rugs. And each time, soap and water (and sometimes a little bleach) -gets us clean again.
Which concerns do you have?
If any of these concerns sound familiar to you, please come in and let us walk you through working a Bunyaad rug into your home. They have truly been some of the best purchases I’ve ever made. But if you need help choosing a couch, well that’s a far more difficult subject!
And if you are too far to come into our year-round locations or rug events throughout North America, we are quite used to working with folks online, giving assistance on going through our virtual stacks of rugs online and shipping rugs on approval to try. Start your experience by looking through our entire inventory online at https://rugsearch.tenthousandvillages.com and submit questions, comments and help requests online through our shopping cart question section.
Let us know your concerns and we will address your questions in a future post.
Thank you, Betty. We will definitely address your concern in a future post and take a look at how rug quality and fair trade are part of the rug cost.
The cost is way over our income !