It's all in the fiber

A single fiber does not make a carpet. But many together do! First, they create a yarn and many yarns create a carpet.

The type and thickness of the fibres, their twist, strength, and elasticity determine the surface appearance and physical properties of the textile floor covering.

For this purpose, the loose fibers must first be brought together. This applies to staple fibers at least – but continuous filament, on the other hand, is stretched and intermingled, giving all the fibers stability and strength.

What's also important is whether the fibers and filament are more or less twisted into a single-fiber yarn or combined together into a multi-fiber yarn, all of which contributes to the texture and feel of the carpet like robustness and durability.

Even if yarns differ in numerous way – we rely on one thing for all of them: quality.

For natural and synthetic yarns alike. For optimum functionality and coloration of the carpets made from it.

For this reason, we only use wool from New Zealand sheep and the highest quality polymers, for example, PP, PES and PA and the environmentally friendly Econyl®.

Thanks to its manufacturing process, Econyl® is not only recyclable, but it also consists of recyclates itself – lending it excellent recovery properties and therefore making it extremely hard-wearing. This feature is particularly important for public and commercial buildings since fibers that are too open-pored cannot meet the high quality classes required in that area.

The quality of our carpets starts with the dyeing process.

Instead of being piece-dyed at the end of manufacturing, our fibers are given their special coloring, either directly in the flock of wool in case of natural fibers or using the solution-dyed process in the case of synthetic fibers, before they are spun. In the solution-dyed process, the corresponding color pigments are added to the polymer granules and then heated together and spun out in liquid form to produce a uniform color for the spinneret-dyed continuous filament.

The advantage of fiber dyeing is that, instead of adhering to the outside of the yarn, the dyes penetrate the fiber. They are therefore more intensive, more resistant to UV light and more resilient to bleaching and cleaning agents. In addition, large batches have the same color – and so do the textile floorings made from them.

As with dyeing, the production of our yarn also depends on the material used.

In contrast to synthetic polymers, natural fibers have to be spun together. But that's no problem for us – the machines we need for this task are available on site at our Thelen spinning mill in Stolberg. And what we can't produce ourselves, we source from our partners, who value quality just as much as we do.

While the carding machine blends and parallels the dyed wool fibres for our carded yarn, it also refines them about 100 times. In order to divide them into narrow ribbons. This untwisted roving yarn is spun into threads at the Nitschel mill. These threads are given a fixed twist on the ring spinning machine. Combined with other threads, they create our unique yarn.

Our synthetic yarns are produced by extrusion, more precisely through the melt spinning process. The molten polymers are pressed through the finest trilobal spinnerets, stretched and then texturized, if necessary. The resulting continuous filaments are naturally spun, as well. Several of these filaments are then intermingled for this purpose. In other words, they are vortexed and fixed using compressed air in order to be ready for weaving and tufting.

Whether natural or synthetic: our yarns all have their own individual structure and physical properties.

We can therefore weave with polyamide, for example, and still lend the final product a classic wool-like texture. At the same time, we can guarantee the high demands on strength and durability for public and commercial buildings in addition to good cleaning properties. Above all, however, we therefore have the opportunity to implement the unmistakable designs in terms of the look and feel of our textile floorings down to the last detail.