Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Area Rug Passion=More Clients

Yesterday I still felt like I was in a tornado. I was still reeling in the excitement of winning the Juno weekend trip and I started to realize all the things I needed to do this week at work and at home. I got to work around 11:40 due to a morning appointment and that made the day go by fast. It was also very steady day of clients picking up their clean area rugs and dropping off dirty ones, plus the phone calls were constant as well. It was a nice normal day.
It seems lately that Luv-A-Rug has been getting what we call tester rugs for cleaning. They usually are a synthetic rug that is used in front of the kitchen sink or an entryway rug. New clients are seeing how we clean their inexpensive rugs and test our knowledge on area rugs to make sure we know what we are doing. After we clean their first rug they bring us their more expensive area rugs for cleaning and sometimes repair. Yes Luv-A-Rug does rug repairs.
Yesterday I spent at least 30 minutes or more with a wonderful lady, I will call her Lady A. She brought in her synthetic 2x3 area for cleaning. She asked me if I knew much about area rugs, I responded that I did indeed. She wanted me to show her some different kinds of area rugs and what made them different or better than other rugs. I showed her some Persians, Belgium's and machine made area rugs. We were discussing rug repairs when another client, Lady B, came in to the shop to pick up her area rug that we had cleaned and did a binding edge on all four sides. We all got chatting about area rug repairs and Lady B told the Lady A that we, Luv-A-Rug, was the place to bring your rugs to for cleaning and especially for repair. Back in February Lady B brought in a Persian for cleaning and we also did a hand repair to the ends of the rug. She was very happy with the repair which included evening up the ends and doing an overcast stitch to stop the rug from fraying any more.
Lady A also wanted to cover a foot stool kind of thing, a hashick?, in an area rug instead of using fabric. I showed her the chair that we have covered in a flat woven rug. It is wrapped around the chair and stapled. Voila! a new chair. She instantly thought of a red flat woven area rug that her father gave to her son and that got her thinking. The rug has a horse in the middle of it and she said that it would work perfect for what she had in mind. The hard part was trying to figure out who does that sort of thing. We have sent area rugs to our hand repair guy to be made into pillows, but never a piece of furniture. She was going to try a few upholstery places to see what they had to say.







Lady A was very thankful for all my knowledge and help. With her 2x3 synthetic area rug we are not only cleaning it we are also putting our protective finish on it to help repel dirt and stains and we are removing the fringes and putting a binding edge on. She is going to bring us some of her other rugs for cleaning and we will discuss repairs as needed. She wishes I could go with her when she goes rug shopping so she doesn't buy an area rug that isn't going to last or isn't such a great deal. I gave her a lot of information to arm her against such things. My only wish is that rug manufactures would stop making area rugs that do not last, are not made to be walked on, and that cannot be cleaned.
Thanks for reading, RugloverMary

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