The anonymous years
What he grew up inside was an export house. It wove well and it wove anonymously: orders arrived from buyers in more than thirty countries, the rugs shipped, and somebody else's label went on the back. The arrangement paid for itself for two decades. It also taught the house everything about how a rug should be made and nothing about how one should be signed.
The name on the back
Carpetstory is what he did about that. Same looms, same dyers, same madder red. The rugs now leave under the house's own name, and they go to the people who actually specify floors: interior designers, architects, and the occasional person who has decided that one good rug is enough.
The house he runs
The atelier makes one-of-one pieces. A single artisan stays with a rug for six to ten months. The dyes are madder, indigo and walnut. The weave runs ten to fourteen Persian knots to the inch, and an eight by ten foot piece can hold over a million of them. Nothing is repeated, and nothing is priced by the metre.
Beside it runs a made-to-measure line for the trade: any size, any shape, colour matched to a RAL or Pantone reference on hand-dyed wool, with the tolerance stated before work begins and a quote inside one business day. He is unsentimental about that half of the business. It is what lets the other half stay uncompromising.
The house has been out in the world before. At Domotex Hannover in 2012 it staged the largest carpet showcase of the fair with the Shalimar collection, and Fashion TV filmed it. He took the only lesson worth taking from that week: the work stands anywhere. It was never the weaving that needed fixing.
The engineer
He is an engineer by training and has not stopped being one. Before the atelier had his full attention he built backend systems in Python and PostgreSQL and made more than three hundred contributions to an internal developer platform used by engineering teams.
That is not a detour from the rugs. Carpetstory runs on tools he wrote, because a house this size cannot afford to lose a promise. Samples, quotes, colour approvals and shipping dates live in one system, which is why a designer in New York gets an answer out of a workshop in Jaipur inside a business day.
The loom sets the pace and will not be hurried. Everything around it can be, and is.
Authorship
The next thing he wants is authorship: the weaver's own mark on the work, and a record of that hand kept with the rug for as long as it lasts. It would make the object honest about who made it, which is the argument underneath everything else here.