A Berkshires company, a striped cotton rug and a second label.

Dash & Albert is the rug label of The Annie Selke Companies, the home-furnishings business that Annie Selke built in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. The company says the rug line was added in 2004, a decade after Selke had started her first brand. In its listing for the High Point furniture market, the Annie Selke company says that Annie Selke founded Pine Cone Hill, its bedding, bath and accessories line, and that “in 2004, we added Dash & Albert rugs.” Galerie magazine, in a Fall 2020 feature on the company, also wrote that Selke started Dash & Albert in 2004.

The rug label grew out of a textile business rather than a flooring one. A profile on the Chairish blog by Dennis Sarlo says Selke studied textile science at the University of Vermont and buying and merchandising at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and that she started Pine Cone Hill on her dining room table in 1994. The same profile calls the 2004 addition of rugs “a major milestone” for the business.

The first Dash & Albert rugs were cotton. The brand’s own High Point listing says Dash & Albert has been part of the Annie Selke Companies “since 2004 when we debuted our woven cotton stripes.” Flat-woven cotton rugs in stripes and ticking patterns remained part of the range in the years that followed, with names such as Fisher Ticking and Tread Lightly appearing in the Chairish profile beside wool kilims and jute.

From cotton the label widened into other fibres. The company’s High Point listing describes a range running from hand-knotted micro hooked wool to performance fibre made from recycled plastic bottles and coated with a UV protectant, sold in standard sizes from 2 by 3 feet up to 15 by 20 feet. It also describes a made-to-measure custom rug programme that includes indoor/outdoor, wool and jute rugs. The Chairish profile says some of the company’s rugs use recycled materials, including denim rag rugs made from recycled denim and indoor/outdoor rugs made from recycled water bottles.

From the Berkshires to a New Jersey rug group.

For most of its life Dash & Albert was run from Massachusetts. Galerie described the Annie Selke Companies in 2020 as based in the Berkshires, with a headquarters built around a nineteenth-century woolen mill, and the company’s outlet and shop stood in Pittsfield and Lenox. The rug label shared that base, its staff and its sales network with Pine Cone Hill and with the Annie Selke name itself.

That changed with a sale. RugNews.com reported on 21 August 2023 that the online rug retailer Rugs USA had acquired the Annie Selke Cos., which it said included the Annie Selke, Pine Cone Hill and Dash & Albert brands. The report quoted Lori King, who was to continue as chief executive of Annie Selke, as saying the brands would go to market “as they do today” under their own names, and it said Annie Selke would stay involved as chief vision officer. The same report said the company’s wholesale representative, CODARUS, would continue in that role, and that distribution centres were being consolidated into the existing Rugs USA network. Rugs USA has owned Dash & Albert since 2023.

A year later the Massachusetts base closed. Business of Home reported on 11 September 2024, and Rug News on 13 September 2024, that the company’s offices in Pittsfield, along with its outlet and its store in Lenox, would close at the end of that year, and that Rugs USA intended to keep the Annie Selke brands operating within its own business. Rugs USA is based in Cranbury, New Jersey.

The label has carried on. In October 2026 the Annie Selke company’s High Point Market listing names Dash & Albert among its brands beside Pine Cone Hill, and the Dash & Albert listing itself is still headed “Under the umbrella of The Annie Selke Companies.” The company’s listing also names outside designers it works with, including Bunny Williams, Mark D. Sikes, Kit Kemp and Marie Flanigan, and in October 2026 it advertised a market event for a new Marie Flanigan rug and bedding collection.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make or sell rugs and carpets for the home. Rug and carpet brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger flooring or furnishing groups, and a single name can cover hand-knotted, hand-tufted, flatwoven and machine-made pieces in wool, cotton, jute or synthetic fibre.

A rug brand’s identity is usually carried less by one design than by a name, a catalogue of patterns and the place or tradition those patterns point to, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its weaving elsewhere or grown far beyond the mill or showroom where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where and how its rugs are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its rugs are woven and how its collections have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A pattern-led rug label inside a founder-named family.

Dash & Albert’s identity has always been bound up with the company around it. It was introduced as the rug label of a business already known for colour and pattern in bedding, and it has been presented ever since as one of a family of names: Pine Cone Hill for bedding, Dash & Albert for rugs and the Annie Selke name over them all. The company’s own listings still describe it in those terms, as a label “under the umbrella” of the Annie Selke Companies.

The rugs themselves carry much of that identity. The label began, in the company’s telling, with woven cotton stripes, and stripes, ticking and simple geometric patterns run through the range alongside kilims and jute. The product names are short and friendly, in the same voice as the bedding, and the company’s description of the range puts pattern and fibre first: cotton, wool, jute and an indoor/outdoor fibre made from recycled bottles, in standard sizes or made to measure.

Collaboration is the third thread. The company names interior designers such as Bunny Williams, Kit Kemp and Marie Flanigan among its partners, and their collections are sold under their own names beside the house labels. That gives the rug label a second register: a house style of stripes and cheerful colour, and a set of designer collections that bring in other points of view.

Ownership has changed the frame but not the name. Rugs USA has owned Dash & Albert since 2023, and the Massachusetts offices and shops closed at the end of 2024, yet the label is still offered under its own name and still described as part of the Annie Selke family of brands.

For a design guide, Dash & Albert shows how a rug label can draw its identity from a sister bedding brand, a founder’s colour sense and a simple woven stripe, and keep that identity through a change of owner. Compare its bedding sibling in our Pine Cone Hill brand guidelines and another American rug business in our Ruggable brand guidelines. For this guide we use ticking blue, cotton ivory, coral and sage with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Dash & Albert’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.