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Harooni International Design Rugs is at 31st Street and Madison Avenue. It's filled with stacks of carpets and rolled rugs. The showroom floor is filled with the smell of a few thousand rugs - an odor somewhere between plastic and rust. Fluorescent bulbs light the room because the windows have been blacked out by rugs on display. The owner, Noori Harooni starts by showing a Tabriz. A traditional-style, Persian rug from the northwest part of Iran. It's a deep blue color with curled, medallion-type designs that run along the edges and in the middle of the carpet.
AX: HAROONI
This is a common fish design Tabriz. Because of the way the motifs are, the little designs, the little patterns are called fish. Or Herati, some people call it Herati. While this one is floral. And that one is geometric.
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The Tabriz is one of many rugs clipped to the wall for display. Most of those on display are antiques. Rug dealers look on antiques as investments, and few part with centuries-old rugs unless hard times call for it. But what Harooni is selling is new.
AX: HAROONI
These are the Chinese, Obusan weave, flat weave, these are the new carpet imitations made in China, imitation of French Obusan, 17th century designs.
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What's available are Chinese, Pakistani and Indian knockoffs of designs from Iran. Harooni says traditional carpets still arrive from Iran - in spite of tight, international trade sanctions. But IN Iran, the number of traditional weavers is declining. Michael Harounian, owner of Ebisons Harounian Imports, says weavers are becoming fewer each generation.
AX: HAROUNIAN
They're willing to take the chance of entering larger cities in the hopes of getting a better job, information technology is one of them and many other fields that are probably better paying jobs then weaving carpets.
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The families that sell rugs are facing the same changes.
AX: BANILIVI
Our family is about four generations in the oriental rug industry. It's about 100 years old.
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That's Leon Banilivi, who owns Banilivi & Son on Madison Avenue. His family started selling rugs from a bazaar in Tehran. Like the weavers, he says, his end of the business is changing , too.
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AX: BANILIVI
You really have to be in it to understand this business. For example in the U.S. many old Armenian dealers are no longer in the rug business, they all went out, their kids didn't want to take over their fathers businesses because it's a tough business. Now they are lawyers or doctors or teachers, they don't have any interest anymore.
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Banilivi's rugs come from India, China and Pakistan as well. He says outsourced, factory-made carpets can be adjusted for consumer demand - unlike, their traditional, Persian counterparts.
Ebisons Harounian Imports, exclusively with interior designers. The showroom floor is not much different then other rug stores in the district: stacks and rolls throughout the room, examples clipped to the wall. But Harounian's store is different only in the ways that he has embraced the changes. He thumbs through some examples attached to the wall by a swinging rack.
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AX: HAROUNIAN
For instance, the Brookfield F45 comes in black as well as ivory.
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It's a Persian design that he displays, as is the next.
AX
Same thing as the TA20 number which is available in both colors. Identical designs but different colors. They're purposely hung side by side to show the availability of different colors in the same design.
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Harounian says the rug industry will not suffer despite the changes. With such a large work force in places like China and India, it will always have new generations learning and working.
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AX: HAROUNIAN
So it's not so much a lack of weavers, there may be fewer in number, but our basic problem currently is the rate of exchange where the dollar is not as strong as before, therefore, our products are a little more costlier then before.
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Harounian hopes that the economy will improve and people will be out shopping again soon.
Tristan Ahtone, Columbia Radio News.