When customers walk into our showroom in Carlstadt and ask "how long has Arsh's been around?" — the answer is technically since 2014. The longer answer is that Arsh's is the current name and current generation of a family rug business that started over a century ago in what's now Pakistan. The continuity matters more than any single name. Here's the full story.

First Generation · Late 1800s — Mid 1900sAllah Buksh, the first weaver.

Our great-grandfather, Allah Buksh, was the start of all of this. He was born in what was then British India and apprenticed as a weaver in his late teens. There are no surviving photographs from this period, no written records of the workshops he learned in. What we have are family stories passed down — that he learned the Persian and Anatolian knot styles in his youth, that he developed a reputation for fine wool work, and that by his middle age he was running his own small workshop training other weavers.

His era was hard. The colonial economy had upended traditional textile production in the region. Pre-Partition India was politically unstable. Two world wars affected supply chains and demand. But the workshop persisted, because hand-knotted rugs always have buyers and weavers always have students. By the time he passed it to his son, the foundation was in place: knowledge of the work, relationships with wool suppliers, a small staff of weavers, and a method.

Second Generation · 1940s — 1980sAyyub Roomani and the founding of Imran Brothers.

Our grandfather, Ayyub Roomani, took over the workshop and expanded it dramatically. The Partition of India in 1947 reshaped the family — many in the rug trade migrated west, settling in what became Pakistan. Lahore in particular became a major center for hand-knotted production, drawing weavers from across the region. Our family settled there permanently.

In 1970, Ayyub formally founded Imran Brothers in Lahore. The "brothers" in the name were his sons — including our father, Imran, who the company would eventually be named after as he came into the business. Imran Brothers grew from a workshop into a significant production house, supplying dealers across South Asia and eventually beginning to export.

What Ayyub built is what makes the current Arsh's operation possible. The supplier relationships for wool. The dye recipes. The pattern library. The trained weavers and their family connections to the workshop. The standards. None of this gets created in a single generation — it takes decades. He passed it to our father with the production capacity intact and growing.

The Imran Brothers workshop has won the PCMEA award (Pakistan Carpet Manufacturers and Exporters Association) and exhibited at AmericasMart Atlanta, where it received recognition as a leading South Asian producer. These honors mean something to us not as marketing but as continuity — the work our grandfather started is recognized by the people who know the craft best.

Third Generation · 1980s — PresentImran Ayyub and the move to America.

Our father, Imran Ayyub, made the move that changed everything: in 1992, he opened Firdous Oriental Rugs at 271 Fifth Avenue in New York City. The Lahore workshop continued under family management; Firdous became the American retail and design-trade arm.

The Fifth Avenue location was deliberate. The NYC rug district at the time was the densest concentration of dealers and trade buyers in the country. Setting up there meant immediate proximity to the interior design industry, auction houses, magazine editors, and the kind of clientele that buys serious hand-knotted rugs. Firdous became known particularly for fine Persian production and custom commissions for designer projects.

For 20+ years Firdous ran as a Manhattan-based gallery serving high-end retail and trade clients, with the Lahore workshop supplying the bulk of new production. This arrangement — family-owned production at one end, family-owned retail at the other, no middlemen in between — is rare in the rug industry. Most American dealers buy through wholesalers or import-export agents; we never had to. The rug that arrives in New York came from a workshop where our cousins still work.

Fourth Generation · 2014 — PresentTaimur Imran and the Arsh's era.

I'm the fourth generation. I grew up around the family business — visiting the Lahore workshop as a child, learning the difference between a Heriz and a Hamadan before I learned long division, watching my father run Firdous through the 90s and 2000s. By the time I entered the business as an adult, the question wasn't whether to join — it was what shape my contribution should take.

In 2014 I opened Arsh's Rugs in Carlstadt, New Jersey. The choice of Carlstadt was strategic. NJ pricing without Manhattan overhead. Larger physical space for both retail and our cleaning / restoration operations. Easy access for tri-state design clients who don't want to deal with Manhattan parking or commute. The rugs come from the same Lahore workshop; the operation here is built for how the design trade actually wants to work in 2026, not how it worked in 1992.

In 2020 we went direct-to-consumer with the launch of arshs.com. This was the other change — making it possible for clients across the country to access the same hand-knotted inventory that previously was only available to people who could physically visit a showroom. The website is now where most new clients first encounter us. The showroom is where the relationships often deepen.

What actually gets passed down.

People ask sometimes what's specifically inherited across four generations. The honest answer is that it's not really the rugs themselves — those come and go, are sold, are inherited by clients, end up in museums or estate sales or back on our floor for restoration. What's inherited is harder to point at:

• Relationships. Our suppliers, our weavers, our dyers — many of these are families our family has worked with for generations. The wool we use in 2026 comes from supplier relationships my grandfather built in the 1970s.
• Dye recipes. The natural-dye knowledge in our workshop — which mordant for which color, what temperature for what shade, how long in the bath — was never written down. It exists in the heads of the master dyers and gets transmitted by working alongside them.
• Pattern libraries. Our workshop has cartoons and pattern books from across four generations of production. Some designs are still in active use; others are revivals of patterns my grandfather's weavers were doing fifty years ago.
• Standards. The quality bar — how a knot should feel, what a finished pile should look like, when a rug is ready to ship and when it needs more work — has been the same in our workshop for decades. Standards drift in businesses that change hands; they hold in families.
• Trust. The clients who buy from us today often heard about us from their parents who bought from Firdous, or their grandparents who bought direct from a different generation. Multi-generational client relationships are themselves an inherited asset.

Why this matters for what we sell.

The honest reason a family rug business produces different output than a single-generation operation: the time horizon is different.

When a new dealer opens, every decision is weighted by survival — sell now, build a customer base, hit revenue targets. When a fourth-generation dealer makes a decision, it's weighted by reputation across generations. We don't sell rugs we wouldn't want our grandfather's name attached to. We don't damage a rug we wouldn't want our great-grandfather to see. The decisions are slower and more conservative because the consequences play out over decades, not quarters.

This is the actual reason we put age and origin claims in writing on every receipt. It's why we send rugs back to the workshop for re-knotting rather than patching. It's why we'll talk a customer out of a purchase if we don't think it's right for them. The math wouldn't work for a one-generation business; it works for a four-generation business because the brand is the inheritance.

Our father is still active in the business. Our grandfather's portrait hangs in the showroom. The workshop in Lahore is run by cousins. When you buy a rug from us, you're not buying from Arsh's Rugs the LLC. You're buying from a family that has been doing this since before either of us was born.

— Arsh's Rugs