Irina Gressog March 20, 2017; Monday 18:00 NST (Nepal Standard Time)
Martin and I had the chance to accompany Sanju and Pavitra, two employees of Formation Carpets (www.formationcarpets.com), on their weekly "supplier visit."
In case you are wondering, Hoste Hainse (HH) and Formation Carpets (FC) are interconnected. Hoste Hainse is Formation Carpet's sister concern and was registered one week before Formation Carpets. The sole purpose of HH was to ensure sound working conditions of the employees of Formation Carpets, not only the employees, but also their children. Complementary day-care and pre-school facilities for weaver's children were the first efforts of HH so that these children would be looked after while their parents were working. As the children grew up, HH started to become involved in obtaining full/partial scholarships for them. This catapulted HH into the education sector. Formation Carpets, a for-profit hand-knotted rug exporting business, bears the low overhead costs of Hoste Hainse.
Due to pollution and environmental issues, we squeezed into the company's electrical car and went to five different suppliers in Bhaktapur + Boudha (5 out of 13) and to one place where the yarn gets dyed and where carpets are finally cleaned before they get shipped to the client.
As the office of Hoste Hainse is in the same building as Formation Carpets, we had seen beforehand how smaller carpets are produced and how the employees process yarn to rolls. Moreover, we already had a look at the graphs of the carpets and got a rough idea how a carpet would look like after completion.
Anyhow, it was eye-opening to see how the carpets look on the spinning wheel. They look so different and so much better than on the graph! We immediately fell in love with the Blue Bali design, a carpet that gets produced in behalf of New Moon, one of the biggest clients of Formation Carpets. We were surprised how much time it takes to finish 1 square meter of the carpet (depending on the knots it can take up to one month). Whenever I will see a carpet in the future I will never forget how much work it is to produce a rug with different colors and patterns and will always keep in mind why handmade carpets are as expensive as they are.
The supplier's staff explained to us what material they use for the carpets. It was interesting to feel and see the difference between wool, allo, silk and viscose. Of course all materials used are of high quality but I think it is no surprise that silk is one of the more expensive materials. Sanju and Pavitra double-checked that the right yarn is used (quality as well as color), that the carpet has the size that was ordered by the client and that the production is on time.
At the last stop we saw how the rugs get their final cleaning before they are shipped to the end customer. In addition, we watched how the raw yarn gets dyed in different colors. It was a very interesting day for us and we took home many new impressions.
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