Word: wool
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Last week the old-line companies were busy changing their ways to meet the new challenge. James Lees, which once sold as much as $71 million worth of wool carpets annually, has stopped all wool-yarn production at its Bridgeport, Pa. plant, because of "heavy inroads" by newer yarns and processes. It will spend $2,300,000 retooling to produce more modern rugs. A second big company, Alexander Smith Inc., has shut down its Yonkers, N.Y. woven carpet mill entirely, is moving to four newer mills (TIME, July 5), and is planning to buy a fifth to make new cotton...
...survival for the old leaders. For years the biggest firms made only three standard types of carpets, all of them woolen and all on looms. The grades ranged from a low-price Axminster weave to a more expensive velvet weave, and a Wilton weave, costliest of all. The best wool for these rugs came from China, India and Pakistan. But in 1950 China slapped an embargo on all wool exports; India and Pakistan followed with stiff quotas on shipments, thus cutting off nearly 30% of the best grade of U.S. wool imports. Prices promptly quadrupled, to as much...
Using cheap cotton, the Southern firms made rugs that cost as little as $4 a sq. yd. ($10 for the best grade), compared to $9 and $15 for good-quality wool rugs. The new cotton rugs matted easily, soiled faster and absorbed more moisture than wool, but they could be cleaned at home. U.S. housewives found cotton rugs a good substitute, and rushed to buy. One former carpet salesman named Eugene Barwick started a company in Georgia on only $4,500, now has expanded his business into a whole line of tufted rugs with annual sales of $32 million...
...such firms as Masland, Firth, and Artloom have all switched over to the new tufted rugs. Besides cotton, the industry is now using new synthetic yarns. Masland has an allrayon rug that, it says, wears better and stays clean longer than cotton and has about the same resiliency as wool. Cost: about $10 a sq. yd. Firth has coated wool with vinyl plastic to make it wear longer; Nye-Wait and others have brought out nylon rugs that cost more than wool ($15 to $45 a sq. yd.) but wear better, are mothproof, and have a rich, glittery shine that...
...direct result of West Germany's postwar industrial comeback and its historic need to "export or perish." The springboard was the war in Korea, which frightened Latin America into loading up on cars, printing presses, lathes, blast furnaces, chemicals and generators in return for coffee, cocoa, sugar, bananas, wool and hides...