Things were going smoothly, and, seeing that we were apparently trying to swim against the tide of progress, it was looking all too easy to accomplish. Then quite suddenly, and with little explanation, the guys we were working with to develop the natural dyes said they didn’t want to carry on. As we were the first people they had worked with who were demanding rather high ethical standards, they didn’t believe that these issues were of growing concern in the west. Where are the orders? they wanted to know. We can’t get orders until we sort the dyes out, we answered. This, it turns out, wasn’t good enough, and so they pulled out.

I can understand their reluctance to spend time developing something that no-one else appears to be asking for. In fact western rug traders have been so clear in their demands for cheaper rugs, woven at speed and using consistent dyes where colour can be precisely matched and repeated, that they had some trouble even understanding our reasons for not doing it that way. That 2007 was the UNESCO year of natural dyes, and 2009 is the UNESCO year of natural fibres means not a thing in an industry that has bent over backwards to try to compete with the cheaper and poorer quality rugs produced by their Indian neighbours.

In a “fast food” market that values speed over quality, progress has meant mechanisation, and rug companies not up to these changes have disappeared. The growing demand for environmentally friendly products over here has yet to make a great impact over there. A change might be coming, but as the Nepalese are still trying to reach the previous goal, it’s difficult for them to grasp why they might need to turn back now.

So, they are on board with everything else (see previous article) because we are paying for the extra time it would make to complete each rug, and people still have the skills, but we parted ways when we attempted not just to use natural dyes, but bring natural dying up to a standard where they could be used with confidence to meet our rather picky western demands. The up-front time required to do this, even with our help, was a step too far. It would mean changing the way the dying is done to make it less of a health hazard to the dyers (although they thought their new chemical dying vats had already achieved this); changing some of the dye stuffs (some of them are poisonous, some come from endangered plants and trees, like red sandlewood which needs to be cut down to get the heartwood suitable for dying, and some are the byproducts of animals or the animals themselves). It also means changing the water that’s being used. The water is so unreliable because of the varying chemical and mineral content (which changes the colour of the dyes), not to mention all the other stuff that gets dumped into it, that we needed to find a way to use a consistent (and consistently clean) water source. Quite prepared were we to invest in the necessary water collection and purification, introduce new natural dyestuff to compensate for the colours we were would need to remove, and pay for the R&D in general. However given the history of rapid industrialisation of the rug industry, they simply don’t (at this point) believe the effort it would take from their side is at all worthwhile. After all, no-one else has ever mentioned these things to them before.

Reaching this rather unscalable brick wall in our development, and after spending a peaceful week when we stopped doing anything to do with rugs and imagined how easy life would be if we were to just give the whole thing up, we decided nonetheless to persevere.

However taking on board the issues the Nepalese raised, we decided it might well be a good idea to test the meerkat first, before we go for full world domination. So we’ve gone back to basics and decided on a very cut down, rather purist approach. Since we cannot possibly engage in anything to do with the chemical dye ‘scene’ as it is in Kathmandu, and we will need to prove ourselves first before we can hope for any dye house to agree to the kind of R&D that would make vegetable dying a real alternative, we are relying on the sheep to come up with their own colours and going dye free. Simples.

Self coloured rugs are a venerable Tibetan tradition and the antique ones we have seen are beautiful in their simplicity of tone. (Plus neutral colours are the most sold colours in the rug industry anyway).

So, for the sake of our suppliers, here’s where you can help us test the meerkat.