My area is too poor, too small, too competitive

 Whine, whine, whine I hear it all the time: “My customers will never pay that” or “maybe in a big city but not in my area”.  It gets real old after a while and every time somebody starts with the excuses I know the odds are overwhelmingly that the excuse is bogus. What they are really saying is they don’t know how to make it work or they lack the confidence to try. Let us look at some of the examples

My area is too small to support a Rug Cleaner. Try telling that to Doug Moerschbacher he lives and works in Pleasant Gap Pa with a population of 2,879. Doug is succeeding in rural North Central Pennsylvania in a county of only 154,722 people. He also did it recently against stiff competition. Another small market success story is Scott Kentfield. He lives and works in Travers City MI the largest city in the 21-county Northern Michigan region with a population of only 14,674. Success anywhere takes hard work but population is not a limiting factor for most people.

My area is too poor to support a Rug Cleaner. Scott and Doug do not live in affluent high income areas but they do not have it nearly as tough as George Bell. George is from Jackson Mississippi the poorest city of its size in the USA but the suburbs are the 8th poorest in the country.  So can an 80% black very low income city support a rug Washer? No, it can support two and both of them eat regularly. Business is so good that George just put in his second centrifuge. But George Bell’s success is not enough to hold back Terry Wetzel’s business. The relative wealth or lack of it is not the limiting factor for most people.

My area is too competitive to support another Rug Cleaner. Big established Rug Cleaning plants that dominate an area are not to be feared. Remember Doug Moerschbacher? When Doug started there were two well established rug washers in his area. Doug is now #1 in his market and he is more expensive than all his competition.  Going up against the 3rd generation well financed well established behemoth is a great way to go. But don’t try to undercut they will eat you alive. Charge more, sometimes a lot more than they charge.

All his sounds counter intuitive to most people. What we have done in RugLover Marketing is to short cut the process and save you 10 or 20 years of trial and error. George Bell has spent his life building a great business. But guys like Doug Moerschbacher, Anthony Belmonte and others have short cut the process and are building best in class business in record time. 500% growth is possible and if you do the plan and really work it is a very realistic goal. If you want to charge far more than your competition, wash more for greater profits and see explosive growth you are our kind of cleaner.

For more information drop Dusty Roberts a line at Dusty Roberts (info@rugbadger.com) or

Stephen A. Roberts

1-866-885-7847

Cell 250-686-7847

Tub Washing or Reckless Tub Washing?

You may also want to visit: Lawsuit over Chlorine and Oriental Rug Washing

For well over a year I have been concerned with the trend towards Tub Washing of Oriental Rugs. Tub washing in its self is not a bad thing in fact in some cases tub washing is a great idea. Paul Iskyan of Rug Renovating the world’s largest rug washing plant uses tub washing for 5 to 10% of his total volume. But one company has been pushing the idea that any size rug plant can load up all their rugs in tubs which they sell and wash all the rugs together. In my surveys 80% or more of all rugs coming in for cleaning have pet contamination primarily dog and cat urine. Tom Monahan of Centrum Force has assured me personally that Tub washing with their chemicals is safe and effective and he has a lab report that proves his claims. But Tom won’t release the report. Now Tom has admitted in a public forum that he uses Dichlor in the bath. Dichlor is a granular pool chemical commonly used to “Shock” a pool or hot tub by turning to Chlorine Bleach in water. This is so shocking (pardon the pun) that it is best if we read what Tom had to say:

Here is exactly what Tom M posted on a discussion board”

“We use Sodium-Dichlor, as do a number of Centrum Force® wash tub owners. A cup or two for 1200 gallons of water. Tests have proved that this is sufficient for our intended purpose. We do not use it purposely to eradicate urine. We remove Urine by using another product. We saturate a rug with U-Turn chemistry, allow at least 30 minute dwell time, and then flush with water using our Centri-Maxx® horizontal centrifuge.

The reason we use granular Sodium-Dichlor in the wash tub has an obvious two fold objective.

1: It provides a barrier of protection in the water to prevent cross contamination of unwanted bacteria while rugs swim together in the tub during a wash cycle.

2: While charging the water for sanitation is accomplished, its properties help in neutralizing floating fugitive dyes releasing from rugs.

This begs another question: What other additive is put into the same water to help manage dye loose in the water from bleeding rugs? Only Wash Tub owners know that "Secret Sauce."

Here is one product we have used:

You can get something like it where pool and spa supplies are sold.” http://mikeysboard.com/forum/showthread.php?265843-Question

When Tom refused to release his secret report I was suspicious but I never imagined anything this devastatingly terrible and blatant. Chlorine is bad for wool. It breaks down the scales and weakens the fibers. Chlorine is regularly used to descale wool in low chlorine concentration baths. This is used to make wool clothing suitable for machine washable clothing. In that case removing the scales is fine for that specific purpose but not for hand-woven Oriental Rugs. It is not just bad for handwoven Oriental Rugs it is very very bad!

By reducing the felting properties of wool the rug becomes more fragile and causes it to wear faster. Additionally removing the scales which allow felting the wool is weaker again accelerating the wear. But that is not all of it. Over time the scales of good untreated wool open and refract light giving the rug what aficionados refer to as jewel tone colors. Without the scales the rug can never reach that pinnacle of beauty that rug owners often wait 50 years to occur. If a rug survives 50 years or more after regular Tom Monahan style tub washing it will never show the beauty that it would have had with proper care and maintenance.

A special plea to Tom Monahan and the Centrum Force® wash tub owners who use Dichlor: Stop! This is wrong, it is bad for the rugs and if you continue to do this reckless practice you should warn your customers that you will co-mingle their rugs with other rugs that may be contaminated with urine, feces, vomit, blood and a host of other problems in a large tub of chlorinated water. 

I hope you enjoyed this review of Tom's article. Comments are welcome and if Tom or his fellow washers find fault with anything I have written they are welcome to contact me and I will post their response here and if I got anything wrong I will correct it.

Oriental Rugs “Fine Art” or Not

I recently had this question posed to me by a Southern California Appraiser. Her customer had extensive water damage from a broken pipe. The insurance company paid the far larger water restoration claim but only allowed $3,000 of $14,000 of the claim for two very fine Tabriz rugs. Their rational was that the rugs were “Fine Art” and the policy had a $3,000 cap on loss of “Fine Art”. I wrote the following opinion and I am quite pleased that the insurance company accepted it and paid the $14,000 claim. I owe part of the credit to a University Professor who forever burnt into my consciousness the phrase; “Words have meaning”. With that in mind here is the letter that prompted the insurance company to pay the full claim (Client information removed).

Hello,

A question has been posed to me: Is a Persian Tabriz rug a work of “Fine Art”? This has been an ongoing question with those who assume that Fine Art means something that is beautiful and I have been dealing with this question going back at least to when I authored the Oriental Rug entry for the Encyclopedia of Modern Asia.1 Since words have meaning I turned to my Oxford Universal Dictionary. 2 “Fine Art” means art that is “the art that is concerned with “the beautiful “or appeals to taste. Often restricted to the arts of design, as painting sculpture, architecture. Hence in sing. one of these arts.” As such Fine Art is an object whose purpose is to be art rather than an object of useful purpose that may or may not be beautiful.

So then the pertinent question is was the Tabriz rugs meant to be, and used as, “Fine Art” or were they made with a useful purpose other than to delight the senses. In this case the rugs were purchased to be floor coverings and were placed in an area where they received foot traffic.  The intent and use shows the rugs to be “Furnishings”. The Oxford Universal Dictionary2 defines Furnishings as “Furniture, fixtures, apparatus, etc…”

Price, value, and inherent beauty have nothing to do with whether something is Fine Art. Therefore a rug made to be a rug and used as a rug is not and cannot be “Fine Art”.

Yours truly,

Barry O’Connell

SeniorFellow Academy of Oriental Rugs

Footnotes:

1. Encyclopedia of Modern Asia. Charles Scribners & Sons; 1 edition (November 27, 2002)

2. The Oxford Universal Dictionary. Oxford at the Clarendon Press; 3rd edition (1955)