Distinctive design

Probably the fastest and most common way of creating unique textile floorings in the world: carpet tufting.

Stylish and customizable, this process scores not only visually, but also technically, thanks to high-quality materials, sophisticated designs and modern high-end manufacturing. Outstanding quality is the result.

And to achieve this quality, we have perfected the manufacturing process. Tufted in a closely staggered pattern, our carpets achieve incomparable density and compactness, which makes them more stable and durable. With proven high wear properties, they can easily withstand 10 to 15 years of heavy use.

Our tufted carpets are not only more hard-wearing – they are also easy to clean and lay. Due to their ease of use, they are also suitable for a wide range of applications and room designs. Not only that, they are as functionally flexible as they are varied in design.

Although tufting is a relatively new process in carpet production, it is nevertheless an old technique: Bronze Age Scandinavians and the Copts of late antiquity were already familiar with this method and used it to decorate their textiles with tufts of fiber or yarn…

Since then, this artisanal mixture of sewing and embroidery has been further developed, refined – and forgotten until it was finally rediscovered and industrialized around 1900. From that point on, the sky was the limit in textile floor design.

What began with hand-tufted bedspreads and rugs in the 18th century made a lasting breakthrough around 1940 with the Cobble brothers. They designed a tufting machine with which pile yarn could be stitched into a base fabric over a width of 1.27 meters.

Since then, such machines have been used instead of manual labor: for carpets with loop pile or velour – or even both.

As varied as the designs and patterns of our tufted carpets are, we have always followed the same basic principle: The warp beams and creels are used to guide the pile yarn to the needles under tension.

Similar to a sewing machine, a large number of adjacent needles then pierce the carrier fabric. Grippers on the lower side hold the yarn in place until the needle is pulled out again, creating loops and determining the pole height. Depending on the design, an additional blade provides the velour pile.

To ensure that everything holds together, the fabric receives a second backing or back coating for the required stability and tuft strength.

Our tufted carpets are not only produced in variable widths of up to four meters, but they are also visually multifaceted in terms of colors, patterns and textures.

Several factors are responsible for this extraordinary versatility, such as the number of pile tufts with needle spacing and stitch density and the pile height, but the backing material and yarn also play an important role.

The number of needles per inch – also known as gauge – is the main factor that affects the compactness of the pile. And in more ways than one: The gauge (5/64″, 1/10″, 5/32″ etc.) indicates how many needles pierce the backing material side by side across the entire width. In turn, their distance from each other determines how closely offset the yarn is tufted. Simultaneously, the gauge also dictates the fineness of the needles and thus the yarn sizes to be employed. Depending on the gauge, coarser or finer yarns can be used. There is room for up to 2000 needles next to each other. If the stitch length is short, a particularly dense and high-quality carpet pile results.

In addition to its processing, the yarn itself also affects the surface quality of the textile floorings due to it having a different feel and structure depending on the intermingling and whether it is more or less twisted. The use of different colors naturally also plays a role. We have perfected this aspect with our RANDOM carpet tile collection: The sophisticated dyeing of the yarn changes the look during the tufting process.

The grippers and their fixation of the slings also achieve visual variety as they can be controlled both generally and individually, enabling different pile heights in the same tufting fabric, as well as a certain pattern of loop and velour (cut-loop). If the rows are staggered, so-called cross-over cut (COC) or cross-over loop (COL) surfaces are created. As this is still not enough for us despite the high number of variations, we also shear our tufted carpets.

For even more variety – for slings and velour alike. And with the level-cut loop process, we also implement all these processes together in one carpet. Is there any pattern that can't be done?

Velvet? Loop? Why not both? Because Overtufting makes it possible.

With our newly developed CL+ technology, we combine both types. And not side by side as usual – but on top of each other. Thus, velvet carpet floors receive artfully designed and striking loop accents. This further densifies their pile and allows for unexpected, creative variations in textile floor design. For structurally enriched and refined carpets. How this can look is demonstrated, among others, by our collection designed by Marcel Wanders: a unique symbiosis of technical perfection and creative extravagance. Used in the Kameha Grand in Bonn.

With our 15 tufting machines, we not only produce a wide variety of carpet designs, we can also do so in small production units – and with special colors.

Starting at 400 m². Instead of printing, we still use spun-dyed solution-dyed yarns for these quantities. Because for us, quality starts on a small scale, while also being a big priority. After all, our employees know exactly what to look out for. They therefore carry out tear and comb tests during the production process in order to check and ensure quality.

To guarantee this quality, all our tufted carpets undergo a special treatment: the Compact process. We have continued to perfect this process over the last few decades. We tuft our textile floorings in a closely staggered manner and then wash them to remove dye brightening agents and ensure greater compactness. The result: uniquely dense, hard-wearing carpeting.