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

How Traditional Are Iran’s Modern Gabbehs?

HANNOVER, Germany; January 17, 2008 --

Is it true that as life gets more complicated, designs get simpler?

There is one enduring example. It is Iran’s gabbeh carpet – today very simple, and very popular.

Gabbehs were not always the minimally decorated, sometimes single-color canvases they are now.

Originally, gabbehs had boldly colored, complex designs. Until the mid-1900s, they still looked more like tribal kilims than like modern abstract paintings.

Nejatollah Hakakian is a Hamburg dealer with many years in the rug business. He dates the change in the gabbeh’s design – and its rise to popularity in the West -- to just a few decades ago.

“Twenty years ago they started in Iran to do gabbehs with less and less designs and with tone-on-tone colors. So they changed from highly decorated carpets to more or less nothing in the field, with just a border around it, and sometimes not even a border,” he says.

“The rule today is three to four colors only, no more, when a normal Iranian carpet has seven to 17 colors. Now the Pakistans and Indians do the same, making carpets with almost no design. Mainly you just see the tone-on-tone colors.”

That simplification has had the effect of making gabbeh patterns, which have a centuries-old history among Iranian nomads, easy to mistake for Western contemporary designs. And it has made the carpet almost a household fixture throughout Europe and, increasingly in the United States.

Hakakian says he once asked a venerable German carpet dealer why European buyers did not prefer the many more complex workshop and tribal carpets Iranian producers could offer him instead.

The reply was one of the best insights Hakakian says he ever received to selling in the West.

“You Iranians are hungry to see grass that is green, but we are full of it in Europe,” the dealer told him. “We need calm and quiet, so the less design you have, the more of your carpets we can sell.”

But if the gabbeh has a heritage of rich, complex designs itself, how much of its contemporary look is still faithful to its past?

A great deal, according to Mahsa Heidarian, whose family company of the same name just won an award for Best Traditional Nomadic Carpet at the Domotex 2008 trade show in Hannover, Germany.

The winning gabbeh’s design very much resembles geometric abstract art.

The Heidarians, based in the west-central Iranian town of Shahr-e-Kord, say they won by letting their nomadic weaver add her own personal touches to a design inspired by a nomadic masterpiece from the past.

"In nomadic carpets, we don't tell the weavers anything, because it is like abstract art, it has to come out of herself to be artistic," says Mahsa Heidarian. "We just try to choose the right person to do it, who knows the tradition of making nomadic carpets."

She adds that finding the right person is not always easy. "A problem is that there are increasingly fewer nomads in Iran who have a traditional weaving knowledge base," she says. "People are increasingly settling down."

The Heidarians say the simplified patterns of modern gabbehs are obtained by magnifying just one or more of the small parts found in a traditional gabbeh. Thus, just a medallion can be expanded, or just part of a field, into a whole carpet design.



"This simplification responds to the Western market's preferences for abstract art but it is also true to tradition, because the simple element is there already," says Mahsa's husband, Arash.

He draws parallels with African art, whose spare lines so interested Europe’s abstract artists at the beginning of the last century. "There is the same immediate rapport between abstract art and nomadic art," he says.

One might argue that the rapport for modern buyers -- not all of them artists -- must go deeper than just recognizing familiar abstract patterns in a nomad's work.

Perhaps there is a longing in all modern societies for simpler things, and the art of tribal peoples -- which is the product of more elemental lifestyles -- helps to satisfy it.

True or false, gabbehs have done well exploring that possibility.

In the early 1990’s, gabbeh producers gained still more interest in the West by turning their backs on synthetic dyes in favor of natural dyes made from local plants, instead – the nomads’ traditional way of coloring the carpets. The return to nature was so successful that the carpet was one of the main attractions at the 1992 Grand Exhibition in Iran.

Authors Murray L. Eiland and Murray Eiland III note in their book ‘Oriental Rugs’ that “the next year there was such a boom in new gabbehs that it had created a wool shortage throughout the country.

The gabbeh’s marketing also got a boost from Iran’s film industry when prominent director Mohsen Makhmalbaf agreed to do a movie centered on the carpets and the Qashqai nomads who weave them. The drama, simply titled “Gabbeh,” was commissioned by an organization dedicated to the export of handicrafts, but it won prizes both at the 1996 Cannes and New York film festivals.

Gabbehs are hardly the only weavings to grow simpler over the decades and become more popular with Western buyers in the process.

Hamburg dealer Hakakian points to carpets woven by Tibetan refugees in Nepal as another example.

"The Tibetan carpet was the first with no design, just one or two colors, no flowers, no medallion. There was a high demand for that until about two years ago. The Tibetan was almost only white or off-white. Gabbeh went with darker tone-on-tones, terra cotta, blue, black, red."

Hakakian says that the Tibetan and gabbeh producers are keenly aware of each other and learn from each other's successes. The main difference between them may be in how rooted they remain in their own traditions.

The Tibetan refugees were encouraged to weave by Swiss aid agencies which helped them resettle in Nepal in the 1960’s. Today, joined by many Nepalese, the refugees are a major weaving pool for Western interior designers.

The gabbeh weavers have never had to leave home. And while some are amenable to design suggestions, the best still stick closely to their own interpretations.

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Related Links:

Gabbehs:


Barry O’Connell (JBOC): Guide To Gabbeh Rugs
http://www.persiancarpetguide.com/sw-asia/Rugs/Persian/Gabbeh_Rugs/Guide_To_Gabbeh_Rugs.htm_Rugs.htm

JBOC's Gabbeh Rugs
http://www.squidoo.com/Gabbeh-Rugs

JBOC’s Notes: Notes on Lori Gabbeh Persian Rugs
http://www.spongobongo.com/em/nm/eme9916.htm

Jozan: Persian Gabbeh Rugs
http://www.jozan.net/distrikter/gabbeh.asp

OldCarpet.com: Gabbeh Carpet Properties
http://www.oldcarpet.com/gabbeh.htm


Tibetan Carpets:

Jacobsen: Tibetan and Nepalese Weaving in Nepal
http://www.jacobsenrugs.com/nepal.htm


Contacts:

Hakakian Brothers
http://de.sireh.com/n/33/nossites_gebr_hakakian_gmbh-hamburg/

Heidarian Carpet
http://www.heidarian.com/html/Process.htm


Advice:

A Magic Carpet Ride Purchasing a Handmade Tibetan rug -- Without Getting Rolled
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/moneymag_archive/2003/05/01/341270/index.htm

Nomadic Felt Carpets Seek A Place In Western Homes

HANNOVER, Germany; January 16, 2008 – Almost all the space for exhibiting handcrafted carpets at the annual Domotex trade show in Hannover (January 12 – 15) is devoted to woven rugs.

But at one stand, an Italian textile design house is displaying something one rarely sees at carpet shows. It is a roughly-textured felt mat as big as a sheet and its surface is brightly painted with an abstract design. The look is similar to a painting in a modern art gallery.



Even the Italian textile house 'Weave,' which produced the felt is not sure whether it is a wall-hanging or a carpet. But the Turin-based group is confident it can find a place in the market for home furnishings.

The inspiration for the product came during a trip to Nepal. While visiting a cooperative development project, one of the company’s owners was struck by some small felt purses being made for tourists.

But when the Italians asked the felt workers to try making a large felt carpet using local designs the results were unsatisfactory. So, instead of trying to recreate traditional motifs from Nepal, the Italian company asked the local producers to just make 60 large white felt carpets instead.

“We decided to make plain felt, plain white, and then bring them over to Italy and get an artist to paint on them. And from there we have had a very good feedback,” says Amanda Smythe, who is one of Weave’s representatives.

The positive feedback includes a nomination at Domotex for the carpet with the best modern design – an astonishing feat considering the low-esteem in which felt is held by most carpet connoisseurs. In the end, the felt creation did not win the prize but the company plans to go ahead with preparing more felt pieces.

In most of the world, felt is still used for inexpensive cushioning in packing cases, or for inexpensive – but itchy -- blankets and jackets, or simply as floor pads to protect more expensive woven carpets.

But where felt is still used as artwork, it has a long tradition.

In Central Asia, felt carpets are still placed on the floor of a yurt, where the thick wool helps insulate the tent from the cold ground beneath.

In Iran, too, felt was once the preserve of originally nomadic Central Asian groups like the Turkmen. Over time it also moved into homes, where room-sized pieces were used as floor covering to fill the gaps between more cherished woven carpets. But today, felt making is almost a lost skill and Iranian carpet shops barely stock it.

Still, pieces of new Iranian felt occasionally show up at Western carpet shows. That is thanks to periodic efforts by dealers to rescue what is almost a dying art.



Abolfazi Ramezani, who is based in London, displays several felt carpets that he has commissioned with contemporary patterns that resemble colorful, abstract paintings. But unlike the Italian-designed felts, the colorful designs are not painted on. Instead, they are applied in the traditional, back-breaking way, which is by kneading pieces of colored felt into a larger felt background.

Ramezani describes what the traditional process entails: “It is very hard work to get the wool to this density. They heat up the wool with very hot water and then, with their elbows, they go on and on and on to make them harder, and harder, and harder, and then they lay the design on top of that and they put hot water on it and they carry on rolling them, over and over again until the design actually gets stuck under the plain wool.”

Ramezani says dealers from Japan and Spain seem to particularly like the felt pieces, because “they are different than any other oriental carpet you see.”

One reason the felt-made carpets are striking is that they usually have different designs applied to the front and back. And the prices are affordable. At wholesale, they range from 70 to 130 euros per square meter – which is at the low end of handmade carpet prices.

Can the market for felt carpets grow larger?

The answer lies in part with Western retailers who, for now, seem barely acquainted with the art form. But it also depends on whether felt producers will continue to make such a labor-intensive product once the standard of living in their home countries rises.

And, says Ramizani, there is still one more player to consider, one that is neither a producer nor a buyer – though it certainly is a consumer.

That player is the humble moth.

“I have been told the moth has a special interest in this quality and they immediately start eating up the wool,” says Ramezani.

He notes that old felt pieces from Iran show considerable moth damage – attesting to their attraction for one of mankind’s most faithful house companions. Making felt less tasty could be one of the first challenges for anyone seriously trying to broaden the market.

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Related Links:

Central Asian Felt Carpets: Kyrgyz Shirdaks

Alibaba: Kyrgyz Felt Rugs