Nothing about a hand-made rug is quick. Follow the seven stages every ACB Rugs piece passes through — from the thread mill and yarn spinning, through colour-matched dyeing, drying and hand-weaving, all the way to the final colour-accuracy check before it leaves our floor.
Every rug begins as a fleece.
At our thread mill, raw wool — sourced from highland flocks and blended with New Zealand and Bikaneri fibre — is scoured, carded and combed into a clean, aligned sliver. Impurities, grease and short fibres are removed so only the strongest, longest staples remain. This is the foundation of a rug that will last generations: the better the thread, the truer the pile.
Thread is spun and twisted into yarn.
The combed sliver is drawn and twisted on the spinning frame into a single ply, then two or three plies are folded together for strength and body. Twist is controlled to the exact turns-per-inch our weavers need — tighter for hard-wearing hand-knots, softer and loftier for plush hand-tufts. The finished yarn is wound into hanks, ready to take colour.
Yarn takes on its final colour.
Approved recipes are scaled to the full lot and the hanks enter our steaming, temperature-controlled dye-baths — lifted and turned on hand-cranked reels so the colour strikes evenly through every strand. We dye the entire yarn requirement for a rug in one continuous lot to guarantee zero abrash between batches. Azo-free, colour-fast dyes are fixed, then the yarn is rinsed until the water runs clear — locking the colour for decades of light and foot-traffic.
We match your colour to the exact POM.
Every shade we produce is captured as a Physical Output Match (POM) — checked against your approved swatch, Pantone reference or a fabric you send us. With a standing library of over 10,000 colour poms to draw from, we can pinpoint your shade in minutes — or blend a brand-new recipe just for you. Each shade is spun into a small tufted pom, labelled with its recipe code and checked under D65 daylight, then weighed to the gram and logged so the colour you approve is the colour that ships.
One of the widest wool shade libraries in India — so we can match, or create, the exact colour your rug deserves.
Dyed hanks are sun-dried, then opened.
Fresh from the bath, the dyed hanks are hung on open-air lines and slow, shade-dried so air moves through every strand — preventing patchiness and setting the fibre's loft. Once dry, each hank is opened on the charkha: loosened, wound and re-spun into weaver-ready balls by hand. It is colour-sorted against the master card one final time before it reaches the loom.
Master artisans bring the design to life.
Working from a hand-painted graph, our weavers tie or tuft the rug knot by knot on vertical looms — up to 400 knots per square inch on our finest hand-knotted pieces. A single large rug can take a team several months. Every few inches the pile is beaten down and trimmed, the pattern checked against the graph, until your rug rises row by row into being.
The finished pile is checked, tuft by tuft, against every POM.
Before a rug leaves the loom, our quality team places each approved POM tuft directly onto the woven pile and inspects the match under D65 daylight — colour by colour, area by area. Recipe codes on every pom are cross-referenced with the master card, and any variation is corrected before finishing. It is the final promise behind every ACB rug: the colour you approved is the colour that ships.
Once woven, each rug is washed to bloom the pile, hand-clipped to level the surface, its edges bound and backing stitched. Three sets of eyes inspect it against your approved strike-off before it is rolled, wrapped and dispatched with full export documentation — always on the date we promised.
Commission your rug