A Chicago retailer, a North Carolina mill and a loom that wove through the back.

Karastan began inside a department store’s manufacturing arm. In a long report published on 5 June 2021, The New York Times wrote that Marshall Field & Co., the Chicago retailer, moved underwear and bedspread manufacturing from Illinois to the town of Leaksville, North Carolina, in 1917. Leaksville later joined two neighbouring towns, Spray and Draper, to form the city of Eden; English Wikipedia dates the vote to consolidate to September 1967.

The rug story starts a few years later. The Times says a mill there opened in 1921 as a branch of Marshall Field’s Homecrest Rug division. An engineer and inventor employed by the company, Eugene Clark, began experimenting with the mill’s Axminster broadlooms. According to the newspaper, he modified the loom so that it wove through the back, giving a machine-made rug the look of a hand-knotted one.

The Times passes on the company’s own account of the result, which it labels “company lore”: the rug came off one of the customised Axminsters on 8 April 1928, and its resemblance to a handwoven Persian carpet was striking enough that it was called a “mystery rug”. The name chosen for the new line leaned into that mystery. Karastan was an invented place, a word that, as the newspaper put it, sounded more like the source of a Persian-style rug than a mill town in the North Carolina Piedmont.

The designs followed the same logic. The Times says patterns were copied by Karastan’s designers from handmade originals and given the names of rug-producing regions in Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Turkey — Ispahan, Kirman, Sarouk, Oushak, Turkoman — along with Karastan’s own number codes. The earliest designs, now called the original Karastan collection, form the brand’s 700 series, according to the newspaper.

A world’s fair, a run of owners and a mill that closed.

One of Karastan’s defining public moments came at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. The Times says the mill made an enlarged version of its “Tree of Life” rug, Kirman pattern 791, and that the company’s executives chose to lay it on the ground for fairgoers to walk across rather than hang it as an object to admire. The newspaper says that appearance turned the mystery rug into “the wonder rug of America”, a phrase that stayed with the brand.

Ownership then moved away from the retailer. English Wikipedia’s article on Cannon Mills says Marshall Field & Co. had acquired mills in the Leaksville area in 1911 and reorganised its textile operations under the name Fieldcrest in 1935. The Times says that in 1953 Marshall Field & Co. sold its mills in the area to an investment company based in Boston, which formed a new company, Fieldcrest Mills. English Wikipedia says Fieldcrest later combined with Cannon Mills as Fieldcrest Cannon in 1986.

The rug business changed hands again in the 1990s. The Times says that in 1993 Fieldcrest Cannon sold its remaining carpet and rug business to Mohawk Industries, the flooring company that still owns Karastan. In October 2026 the Karastan website was published under a Mohawk Industries copyright line.

The Eden mill did not outlast those changes. The Times says the Axminster looms made Karastan’s worsted wool rug from 1928 until 2019, when Mohawk closed the department that ran them, and its June 2021 report described the Eden mill as closing. The newspaper said the brand would continue, with Mohawk consolidating rug production at its Georgia facilities, where most of the area rugs would be synthetic and the few wool ones still produced would not be made on the Axminster looms.

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 name built on a place that does not exist.

Karastan’s identity rests on a deliberate borrowing. The rugs were made on power looms in a North Carolina mill, yet everything about how they were named and presented pointed east: an invented place name, pattern names taken from rug-weaving regions of Iran, the Caucasus and Turkey, and designs that, as The New York Times described them, were copied from handmade originals. The number codes added a second, more practical layer, giving each pattern a catalogue identity alongside its evocative name.

The 1933 world’s fair display shows how the brand chose to argue its case. Rather than presenting a rug as a precious object, the company, as the Times tells it, put one on the floor and let the crowds walk on it. The message was durability as much as beauty, and the phrase “the wonder rug of America” joined an American industrial story to an imported visual language.

The later history shows a brand outliving its birthplace. The name passed from a Chicago retailer to Fieldcrest, to Fieldcrest Cannon and then to Mohawk Industries, and the Times reported in 2021 that production of the Axminster wool rug had ended in Eden while the Karastan name carried on.

For a design guide, Karastan shows how a name, a set of pattern titles and a single public demonstration can give a machine-made product a lasting identity. Compare two other American rug names in our Nourison brand guidelines and Safavieh brand guidelines. For this guide we use madder red, indigo, old gold and wool ivory with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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