Twenty-nine years before Edison lit his first lightbulb. Half a century before the first Model T rolled out of Detroit. In Tehran, the royal court of the Persian Empire announced a contest: Golestan Palace, the jewel of the empire, deserved a rug worthy of its halls, and the finest ateliers in Persia were invited to compete for the commission.
My great-great-grandfather won.
His rug was laid in Golestan Palace, and our family earned an honor almost no craftsman ever receives: the right to bear the royal crown as our family crest. But the thing he passed down wasn't the prestige. It was the standard: in our family, a rug was never a product pulled from a pile. It was a commission, designed for one room, one family, one lifetime.
Five generations have worked under the same two words: honesty and integrity. My grandfather lived them beyond the loom, a master of his craft who poured what it earned him back into his community, building schools and hospitals. In our family, what you make and who you are must match.
"Weave every rug as if your great-great-grandchildren will stand on it one day. Ours do."
Empires Fall. Standards Don't.
The empire that held that contest no longer exists. Dynasties fell, borders moved, and the craft was carried through all of it. Hand to hand, parent to child, loom to loom, across continents, until it reached me: a kid who attended fourteen schools in fifteen years, always the outsider, always seeing solutions others didn't.
Then I looked at how rugs are sold, and I barely recognized my family's trade. Pick from what's in stock. Compromise on the size. Settle on the shape. Wait months, pay a stranger's markup, and never know whose hands made it...if hands made it at all. The industry had turned the most personal object in a home into the least personal purchase in it.
The Cold Nights
Reviving a five-generation craft nearly broke me. I built the customization technology from scratch and tested hundreds of materials, and just as we were ready to launch, the pandemic hit. The team was let go. I found myself working alone on cold nights, keeping a 170-year-old promise with no one left to keep it to.
So I bet on the craft one more time. The Woven Show, in Orange County. An exhibition with artists proving a rug could be a canvas. The response overwhelmed us. People didn't just want to buy rugs, they wanted to create them.
To take that to everyone, I needed a partner I trusted like family. I'd known Mason Littlejohn since Chapman University. Same classrooms, same late nights, the kind of friendship you can build a company on. Mason came from advertising and fashion; he knew how to blend art and business the way my family blends wool and silk. I brought the craft and the vision. Mason brought it to the world.
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Years of Fine Rug Making
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