Threads Of Life

Cocoon Fine Rugs is celebrating a decade of shaping innovative carpets with the opening of its new store in Jaipur.

- Suman Tarafdar

Notwithstanding Jaipur’s crème de la crème who had gathered to grace the evening, it was difficult to look away from what was on the floors. Cocoon Rugs, one of India’s top rug brands, was unveiling its fourth showroom, in its home city of Jaipur.

Cocoon Rugs marks a decade of stunning clients and admirers with rugs that many would approximate to be closer to art than floor covering. For Founder and Creative Director Ayush Choudhary, the story is older than that. His family owned Choudhary Exports, which has been in the business of carpet manufacturing and export of high-end rugs for nearly four decades.

The newest showroom – brand stores already exist in Mumbai, Kolkata and Bengaluru – is also where the journey of Choudhary Exports began. While the 5,000 sq ft showroom is at an upper level, lower levels of the facility house a manufacturing hub, quality control and all other administrative processes for the export as well as retail business. Indeed, even though the finished rugs are the undoubted highlight, the stories of the carpets emerge through overflowing shelves of wool in myriad hues, of rooms full of skeins and yarns and graph sheets that detail the designs to be implemented, sacks with ‘code’ notation – intelligible only to the weavers to whom they are headed – it’s a world that few customers who delight in the finished carpets get a feel of. India’s carpet sector – much maligned for long – has cleaned up its act by making the journey of weaving more transparent.