Our family's life in the rug trade began in Lahore, Pakistan, where the first generation, Allah Buksh, built a handmade-rug business the hard way — sourcing weavers, wool, and dyes in a young, still-forming country. Once the workshops were established, he opened re-export channels reaching Singapore, Malaysia, the Middle East, and Europe.

His son, Ayyub Roomani, was active in the family trade but pursued another calling alongside it — broadcasting — and served as Chief Director of Radio Pakistan. The loom kept running through it all.

In the 1980s, the third generation, Imran Ayyub, began reaching westward — manufacturing rugs in Pakistan for major U.S. retailers and traveling back and forth between Lahore and New York. He had founded the family's Pakistani manufacturing company, Imran Brothers, in 1970 — the workshop where our own weaving has been done ever since. In 1992, he opened a warehouse and trade showroom in the heart of Manhattan, at 271 Fifth Avenue (between 29th and 30th Streets), under the name Firdous Oriental Rugs. The structure was simple and has stayed that way ever since: Imran Brothers was the mother company — the manufacturer — and Firdous Oriental Rugs was the U.S. distributor. The showroom found a following among prominent interior designers, design houses, furniture brands, and retail buyers.

Parallel to the Manhattan operation, the fourth generation, Taimur Imran, opened his own business in 2014 — Arsh's Rugs, in North New Jersey, fifteen minutes from New York City. The business served the trade exclusively — designers and retailers, wholesale only — for its first six years.

In 2020, during the pandemic, we made a decision that changed the shape of the company: it didn't feel right that the savings of buying direct from the family loom should be available only to the trade. We opened the doors to retail clients too. Today, we serve clients across New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, with nationwide shipping for everyone else.

"Each generation took the business one step further — but the loom, the wool, and the standard have never changed."

What hasn't changed across these four generations is the loom itself. Every rug we sell is still hand-knotted by master weavers we know personally, using hand-spun wool and traditional dyes, on patterns we either design ourselves or have curated for their authenticity and character.

There is no warehouse middleman. There are no licensed brands. There is just our family, the weavers we've worked with for generations, and the rug at the end of it.

Hand-knotted rug weaving is, by most measures, a fading art. The economics are hard. The skills take a lifetime to learn. Younger generations have moved to cities and into easier work, and entire weaving traditions have already disappeared in our lifetimes.

From the very beginning, Imran Brothers —Firdous Oriental Rugs— and now Arsh's Rugs — has felt a responsibility to push against that decline. Not by lecturing about it, but by taking care of the families whose hands keep the craft alive.

That has always meant two things. First, steady work — multi-generational employment for the families who weave for us, so that knowing the craft is also a way to make a living. Second, education — making sure the children of our weavers can go to school, and continue on to higher education if they choose to. The expectation in our workshops has never been "your son will also weave." It has been "your son will go further than you did."

That commitment is ongoing. A percentage of our proceeds still goes directly toward funding higher education for the children of our workers and weavers — so that the next generation has options the previous one didn't. If the loom is part of their story, it should open doors, not close them.

"Your son will go further than you did."
— The workshop's standing promise to its weavers

We don't think of this as charity. It's an obligation that comes with being the manufacturer rather than the middleman. The families on our looms have given four generations of our family a livelihood. The least we can do is make sure their children have the option of any livelihood they want.