Sunday, August 31, 2008

Tufted Carpets For Affordable Home Improvement

A look a the history of tufted carpets proves to be very intriguing. It all began with a Georgia woman in the 1890s. Catherine Evans Whitener began hand crafting tufted products. Her crafts were so popular that it soon became a craze that spread throughout Tennessee, Georgia and the Carolina's.

The 1930s showed Singer, a producer of small sewing machines, adapting his machines to the tufted textile industry. This allowed companies to quickly generate large quantities of robes, throw rugs, toilet covers and bedspreads. By the 1940s, the tufted-textile industry had progressed into a very profitable one.

Manufacturers of wool carpets soon began putting the new tufted carpets down by claiming that they were of poor quality because of the cotton fibers used. This issue was resolved for tufted textile manufacturers when DuPont introduced the bulked, continuous filament nylon.

Performing at the same level as wool, the new nylon was as inexpensive as cotton and could be made and sold for a square foot price that was half that of wool carpeting. The 1960s proved to be a decade of significant growth in the carpet industry.

Four companies controlled the majority of the carpeting industry in the year 2000. Beaulieu, Mohawk, Shaw and Interface were the four companies that produced 80% of the carpets made in the United States.

The newest company in the group was Interface. Interface chose not to get into the residential carpet market, and instead ventured into the relatively new commercial carpeting market. This was when the tufted carpets industry was introduced to "modular carpeting," or floor mats.

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