ROME, February 22, 2008 -- Germany and the United States are the countries that buy the most Persian rugs, each year taking about 50 percent of Iran’s exports.
But it is Italy, the third biggest consumer, which seems to love them the most.
It is only in Italy that Persian carpets appear night after night on their own television shows, sometimes on two channels at once.
The shows are for telemarketing but, because carpets are beautiful and because Italians are unabashedly public in their adoration of beauty, the shows have become national institutions. On the air for decades, they have their own recognizable stars whose one-man performances attract not only carpet buyers but just-lookers of all sorts.
The king of this commercial theater is Alessandro Orlando, whose full name composed of two first names is enough to be memorable by itself. He appears on the Telemarket Green Elephant satellite channel, which also sells everything from porcelain to paintings to antique furniture. Alessandro sells those, too, but he reserves his most passionate performances for carpets in general and Persian carpets in particular.
As the show begins, he is sitting or standing alone in a cocoon of carpets. They are hung on the walls beside and behind him. They cover the floor beneath him. He is pensive.
“Over the past 100 years, there have been only five names of master Persian carpet makers known the world over,” he begins. “Mohtashem, Hadji Jalili, Habibian …”
“The most famous of them is Usted Fatollah Habibian. So famous that three years ago Iran, recognizing his work as part of its national patrimony, forbid removing any remaining Habibians from the country.”
Now, Alessandro looks directly at the camera and the pace quickens.
“But tonight, we have something extraordinary. No museum, no gallery in Europe has ever assembled the kind of collection of Habibians we have here, on these walls. There are only two Habibians in London’s V&A, a couple in Tehran’s carpet museum …”
Then, just when the camera pulls back and begins showing the carpets on display, Alessandro does what makes his show – and Italian telemarketing – so sui generis. He doesn’t begin selling, but pauses instead to launch into a full 15-minute homage to Habibian, his career, and his art.
That includes: Habibian’s birth around 1900, his early years aspiring to be a musician in Nain, the city’s rich tradition of weaving that shifted his attention to design, and finally his discovery of a new way of wrapping six strands of silk into a single fiber which, Alessandro says triumphantly, makes his carpets “as absolutely indestructible as they are beautiful.”
There are photos of Habibian on screen, sitting in a room of carpets. Alessandro has become his voice. “A true master can only produce 500 carpets in his lifetime because he is a perfectionist," he says. "We live in a world of false artists, false because they imitate the masters. They are good but they are ‘copyists’ … you will never find two Habibians that are the same, any more than two Picassos.”
When the selling finally does begin, the mood becomes much more businesslike. But Alessandro has set the stage so well that the prices of the goods on sale raise doubts only among collectors. For the rest, the tag of just 5,250 Euros for a six-square-meter designer carpet is a dream come true.
Alessandro's superlatives ring out and, in the background, so do the phones.
“A white diamond to put in your salon!”
“An enchanted garden!”
“A palace constructed from a carpet!”
“Mama … a Habibian!”
By the time it is over – a full hour later – Alessandro has sold enough to put noticeable gaps in the wall of carpets behind him. Muscular arms that briefly appear on camera pull the sold pieces down and take them away.
Alessandro himself is exhausted. He has walked the equivalent of several kilometers within his small studio, knelt on carpets, draped ones he likes over one knee, draped ones he likes even more over one shoulder, and generally proven that the church of art in Italy is every bit as impassioned as evangelist churches in America.
What does Alessandro look like? He is simply the man you would find standing beside you at the counter of an espresso bar, with a rumpled suit and no briefcase. His most prominent features are his black hair, which contrasts vividly with his graying temples, and his black eyebrows which rapidly change expression. He is Everyman.
There are lesser stars of Italian telemarketing, which runs 24 hours a day. But no others rise above their on-screen roles. There is a more intellectual type who whispers footnotes of art history, there is a more physical type who comes on strong like a boxer, and there is a hypnotic type who intones over and over: “with this investment you will never lose.”
There is even a man who dresses in a brocaded jacket like a yacht captain, but he sells antique dressers and commodes, not textiles.
The telemarket programs have been on the air so long that thousands of people have circulated through them as off-screen prompters whispering carpet dimensions and prices to the showmen or as delivery boys taking the goods to customers.
Hadi Dadashian, an Iranian-American who lives in San Francisco, worked with a telemarketer while he was a student in Rome decades ago. He still remembers a delivery to Gina Lollobrigida.
“When we got to her apartment it was very late at night,” he says. “She was all alone and she opened the door herself.”
He recalls that the actress lived in a fabulous setting but looked sad and was watching all-night TV. She gazed for a long time at the carpet she had ordered and several times ran a red toe nailed foot over it to check its softness. Then she accepted it, like a bouquet of flowers she had bought to cheer herself up.
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Related Links
Alessandro Orlando
Alessandro Orlando: “Meravigliosa!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEfU1I3gKBQ&feature=related
Alessandro Orlando: Too Busy To Speak
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95PQ3NBGuPU&feature=related
Fatollah Habibian
Barry O’Connell: Habibian Nain Rugs
http://www.spongobongo.com/em/em9653.htm
Showing posts with label collecting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label collecting. Show all posts
Friday, 22 February 2008
Thursday, 14 February 2008
As Costs Rise, Iran's Carpet Producers Look Abroad
HANNOVER, Germany; January 22, 2008 --
Rising production costs are causing some Iranian producers to move operations to India and Pakistan, where labor is less expensive.
Particularly feeling the squeeze are companies which try to weave the highly ornate styles that traditonally have made Persian carpets so famous.
Those styles include Hadji Jalili -- a highly complex design originally produced in Iran from 1880 to 1925 by a renowned Tabriz workshop of the same name.
Today, producers say, recreating that level of detail using highly skilled weavers in Iran is prohibitively costly. A Hadji Jalili is woven with dozens of colors, making its production an extremely time-consuming and painstaking process.
One company that set out to recreate the Hadji Jalili carpets in sizes suitable for mansion rooms -- where they traditionally go -- soon found itself looking to the subcontinent instead.
"If we wanted to produce this quality in Iran, it would cost four to five times as much," says Kambiz Jalili, an owner of the U.S.-based firm Hadji Jalili Revivals who attended this month's Domotex carpet fair in Hannover, Germany.
He adds, "The majority of weavers even in an area of India accustomed to making very fine and very intricae designs refused to weave these because in every rug we have anywhere from 16 to 30 colors and there may be eight colors which are so similar that it is extremely difficult for the weaver to distinguish between the yarn colors and it is very easy to make mistakes."
The complexity of the rugs puts them at the high end of carpet prices -- about $ 1,750 per square meter retail. By the time they are woven large enough to fit a palace ballroom, the retail price becomes about all the market will bear.
Asked if his customers truly are palace owners, Jalali says "they better be, to be able to afford them!"
Producing a quintessentially Persian carpet outside of Iran may seem like an extraordinary example of global outsourcing.
But as Iran's economy grows with high oil prices -- which today are around $ 100 a barrel -- Iranian producers say they increasingly find themselves struggling at home.
Sadegh Miri is one of the owners of Tehran-based Miri Iranian Knots. He says that over the past 10 years, the cost for weavers in Iran has gone up "300 to 400 percent."
Miri has remained successful by focusing on antique collectors. That is another wealthy clientele which will buy new rugs of classical quality if antique ones cannot be found in the dimensions and colors they seek.
It is high-end business like Hadji Jalili Revivals but, due to the labor costs, one restricted to much smaller carpet sizes. Miri's retail prices, which reflect the differences in the Iranian and Indian production markets, range from $ 2,500 to $ 7,500 dollars per square meter.
Does the multi-generational company fear that one day it will have to relocate?
Miri brushes off the suggestion with a laugh. "If that day comes, I will stop working," he says. "I will stay in Iran and continue until the market decides."
But Miri does predict that much of Iran's lower-end carpet production will eventually follow the global migration to lower-cost lands.
"In the future, only the high-end carpets will survive and the commercial end will go to India and China because we can't compete with them regarding the prices," he says. "Even now, many Iranian producers have gone and they are in India or Pakistan and they are producing there."
Not just labor costs are rising, so are the costs of materials.
Hossein Attaran of Tehran-based Carpet Heritage says that particularly affects producers who use natural dyes and handspun wool. Those are the materials an increasing number of carpet makers bank upon to revive flagging customer interest in their industry.
Attaran says decades of mass carpet production using synthetic dyes and machine-spun wool have flooded the market with low-quality pieces from every carpet-weaving country. That has left buyers jaded and looking for less artificial products.
But as interest in organic carpets -- those colored with plant-based dyes -- grows, so do the prices of the materials themselves. Madder root, a source for red dyes, has shot up from 70 cents a kilo a few years ago to $ 4 a kilo today. Handspun wool today costs $ 10 dollars a kilo, or five times more than machine-spun wool.
That creates pressure to convince the public the difference is worth it. And in Iran it only adds to the difficulties of persuading buyers to buy expensive Persian carpets from their homeland rather than lower-priced look-alikes from elsewhere.
Carpet Heritage this year presented a new line to emphasize the long history of art and culture unique to Persian carpets. Its limited edition of "Persian Poem Carpets" has a quatrain from Omar Khayyam subtly and elegantly woven into the border of each piece.
"Bringing the two forms, poetry and carpets, together shows a very traditional way of Persian thinking about how we should appreciate life," Attaran says.
Iran’s hand-woven carpets are one of its biggest export commodites after oil. The country exported some $400 million of hand-woven carpets in 2006, the latest figures available, with the United States and Germany as the biggest destinations. The carpet industry directly or indirectly employs some 1.4 million people.
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Related Links:
News:
Reuters: Iran carpet traders hope quality will trump rivals
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSDAH24617320070917
Reuters: Five facts about Persian carpets
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSDAH24627320070917
RugArt: Annual Rug Production At 6m Square Meters
http://www.rugart.org/news/shownews.asp?id=3418&temp=english
Zawya: Persian Rugs Still On Top
http://www.zawya.com/Story.cfm/sidZAWYA20071227042009/SecMain/pagHomepage/chnIran%20News/obj4D013B07-9736-4570-BBD1F1C13DD6B6E1/
Haji Jalilis:
Barry O’Connell: PersianCarpetGuide: Guide to Haji Jalili Tabriz Rugs and Carpets
http://www.persiancarpetguide.com/sw-asia/Rugs/Persian/Tabriz/Hajji_Jalili_Tabriz_Rugs.htm
Omar Khayyam:
Wikipedia: Omar Khayyam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khayyám
Contacts:
Hadji Jalili Revivals
http://www.hjrrugs.com/
Miri Iranian Knots
http://www.mirssg.com/english/head.htm
Carpet Heritage Company
http://www.carpetheritage.net/index.php?page=welcome.php
Advice:
How to Buy an Oriental Rug and not Get Taken on a Carpet Ride
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/moneymag_archive/1997/05/01/225684/index.htm
Rising production costs are causing some Iranian producers to move operations to India and Pakistan, where labor is less expensive.
Particularly feeling the squeeze are companies which try to weave the highly ornate styles that traditonally have made Persian carpets so famous.
Those styles include Hadji Jalili -- a highly complex design originally produced in Iran from 1880 to 1925 by a renowned Tabriz workshop of the same name.
Today, producers say, recreating that level of detail using highly skilled weavers in Iran is prohibitively costly. A Hadji Jalili is woven with dozens of colors, making its production an extremely time-consuming and painstaking process.
One company that set out to recreate the Hadji Jalili carpets in sizes suitable for mansion rooms -- where they traditionally go -- soon found itself looking to the subcontinent instead.
"If we wanted to produce this quality in Iran, it would cost four to five times as much," says Kambiz Jalili, an owner of the U.S.-based firm Hadji Jalili Revivals who attended this month's Domotex carpet fair in Hannover, Germany.
He adds, "The majority of weavers even in an area of India accustomed to making very fine and very intricae designs refused to weave these because in every rug we have anywhere from 16 to 30 colors and there may be eight colors which are so similar that it is extremely difficult for the weaver to distinguish between the yarn colors and it is very easy to make mistakes."
The complexity of the rugs puts them at the high end of carpet prices -- about $ 1,750 per square meter retail. By the time they are woven large enough to fit a palace ballroom, the retail price becomes about all the market will bear.
Asked if his customers truly are palace owners, Jalali says "they better be, to be able to afford them!"
Producing a quintessentially Persian carpet outside of Iran may seem like an extraordinary example of global outsourcing.
But as Iran's economy grows with high oil prices -- which today are around $ 100 a barrel -- Iranian producers say they increasingly find themselves struggling at home.
Sadegh Miri is one of the owners of Tehran-based Miri Iranian Knots. He says that over the past 10 years, the cost for weavers in Iran has gone up "300 to 400 percent."
Miri has remained successful by focusing on antique collectors. That is another wealthy clientele which will buy new rugs of classical quality if antique ones cannot be found in the dimensions and colors they seek.
It is high-end business like Hadji Jalili Revivals but, due to the labor costs, one restricted to much smaller carpet sizes. Miri's retail prices, which reflect the differences in the Iranian and Indian production markets, range from $ 2,500 to $ 7,500 dollars per square meter.
Does the multi-generational company fear that one day it will have to relocate?
Miri brushes off the suggestion with a laugh. "If that day comes, I will stop working," he says. "I will stay in Iran and continue until the market decides."
But Miri does predict that much of Iran's lower-end carpet production will eventually follow the global migration to lower-cost lands.
"In the future, only the high-end carpets will survive and the commercial end will go to India and China because we can't compete with them regarding the prices," he says. "Even now, many Iranian producers have gone and they are in India or Pakistan and they are producing there."
Not just labor costs are rising, so are the costs of materials.
Hossein Attaran of Tehran-based Carpet Heritage says that particularly affects producers who use natural dyes and handspun wool. Those are the materials an increasing number of carpet makers bank upon to revive flagging customer interest in their industry.
Attaran says decades of mass carpet production using synthetic dyes and machine-spun wool have flooded the market with low-quality pieces from every carpet-weaving country. That has left buyers jaded and looking for less artificial products.
But as interest in organic carpets -- those colored with plant-based dyes -- grows, so do the prices of the materials themselves. Madder root, a source for red dyes, has shot up from 70 cents a kilo a few years ago to $ 4 a kilo today. Handspun wool today costs $ 10 dollars a kilo, or five times more than machine-spun wool.
That creates pressure to convince the public the difference is worth it. And in Iran it only adds to the difficulties of persuading buyers to buy expensive Persian carpets from their homeland rather than lower-priced look-alikes from elsewhere.
Carpet Heritage this year presented a new line to emphasize the long history of art and culture unique to Persian carpets. Its limited edition of "Persian Poem Carpets" has a quatrain from Omar Khayyam subtly and elegantly woven into the border of each piece.
"Bringing the two forms, poetry and carpets, together shows a very traditional way of Persian thinking about how we should appreciate life," Attaran says.
Iran’s hand-woven carpets are one of its biggest export commodites after oil. The country exported some $400 million of hand-woven carpets in 2006, the latest figures available, with the United States and Germany as the biggest destinations. The carpet industry directly or indirectly employs some 1.4 million people.
#
RETURN TO HOME PAGE
#
Related Links:
News:
Reuters: Iran carpet traders hope quality will trump rivals
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSDAH24617320070917
Reuters: Five facts about Persian carpets
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSDAH24627320070917
RugArt: Annual Rug Production At 6m Square Meters
http://www.rugart.org/news/shownews.asp?id=3418&temp=english
Zawya: Persian Rugs Still On Top
http://www.zawya.com/Story.cfm/sidZAWYA20071227042009/SecMain/pagHomepage/chnIran%20News/obj4D013B07-9736-4570-BBD1F1C13DD6B6E1/
Haji Jalilis:
Barry O’Connell: PersianCarpetGuide: Guide to Haji Jalili Tabriz Rugs and Carpets
http://www.persiancarpetguide.com/sw-asia/Rugs/Persian/Tabriz/Hajji_Jalili_Tabriz_Rugs.htm
Omar Khayyam:
Wikipedia: Omar Khayyam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khayyám
Contacts:
Hadji Jalili Revivals
http://www.hjrrugs.com/
Miri Iranian Knots
http://www.mirssg.com/english/head.htm
Carpet Heritage Company
http://www.carpetheritage.net/index.php?page=welcome.php
Advice:
How to Buy an Oriental Rug and not Get Taken on a Carpet Ride
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/moneymag_archive/1997/05/01/225684/index.htm
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