I received an email last week from a friend who asked why on earth I would leave a job I loved that allowed me to do some pretty awesome events (Jamaica, Vegas etc...) for something as boring as carpet. I haven't replied yet because I kind of agreed that carpet can be a little dull. Then I started thinking, it might seem dull to talk about something that we basically wipe our feet on, but there's a context there that is kind of amazing. This is the phenomenally long email I'm sending him tomorrow. That'll show him for asking that question!In 1895, a fifteen year-old girl named Catherine Evans made a bedspread. This event would have gone entirely unnoticed because quite frankly it was precisely the kind of event that people tend not to notice. But something happened, two things that were uniquely, remarkably boring. The first was that this happened just outside of Dalton, Georgia. At a time when the city of Atlanta, which would go on to become one of the nation’s most important urban centers was still a backwater, Dalton had even less to recommend it. There was little infrastructure, few manufactured goods were produced locally so products were shipped in. And while Dalton was the home of two textile mills, the only real industry was the foundries over the state line in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The second event was the phenomenally boring creation of Miss Evans’ bedspread itself. She purchased the muslin squares and the cotton yarn and began to sew it all together. The only thing about it that could, at a stretch, be mildly interesting is that she used part of the yarn to make large looping stitches to emphasize the pattern. She then used household scissors to cut the top of the loop creating two tufts of thread from the single loop. She unraveled the twists of yarn and spread out the tufts to create a textured pattern on the face of the bedspread. This technique was called “tufting” (see, only mildly interesting).
There’s nothing efficient about making a bedspread in this manner. The investment of money for material and thread, the extensive time required, not to mention backache and cramped fingers meant that while the tools and materials were commonly available not many people produced these goods by hand. Even in the south, most people purchased woven textiles produced in northern mills from imported raw materials. But Catherine, after making the first spread, actually did do something remarkable—the first unusual event of this story actually. Ignoring the difficulties and slow pace, she began working on another bedspread, and another after that. So thanks to a teenager with a stunted social life the Georgia Tufted Carpet industry was conceived, carried and delivered. And though the event happened with little notice there was a bit of fanfare. The second bedspread was a wedding present for a sister in law and though by all accounts the wedding was a modest affair it’s worth mentioning here because everything else up to this point had been so perfectly boring. Outside the local community the wedding passed without notice as did the gift of a hand-made, tufted bedspread. And although the great Northern Woolen Mills didn’t know it, they were on borrowed time from that point on.
The American textile industry traces its roots to the very founding of this great nation. Weavers and looms and techniques came over from Europe. Mills were built and business went on in America much as it had in Europe. There were a few changes, for example, as the American textile producers grew; they stopped purchasing raw materials from European middle markets and established their own direct supply chains. And some patterns and techniques inevitably developed that were distinctly American. Alternative raw materials were tried with very limited effect. The public bought wool because that was what dominated the market and the mills made woolen products because that was what the public bought. The advances of the industrial revolution occurred roughly parallel on both sides of the Atlantic. So the big, established industries kept doing things the same way they always had and everything was fine—if a little bit boring.
Carpet is big business in Dalton and the surrounding communities. Manufacturing facilities located all within one hundred miles of Dalton produce 70 per-cent of the world’s tufted carpet and bring in over $11 billion in revenue. In contrast to its unremarkable beginnings, the story of that growth is completely, wholly amazing. In fact one of the truly surprising things is how closely that story follows the story of another, later revolution that rose from humble beginnings to shake and then dominate the very industry that had dismissed its potential—the computer and internet revolution.
The carpet industry had remained virtually unchanged for one hundred years. Weaving was the method and wool was the medium. There was so much investment, and the sales represented such a huge percentage that the established industries resisted rather than encouraged innovation and change. Think of the existing carpet industry at that time as IBM—Big Blue. The company that famously stated that the future of computers is in hardware and that no one would want a computer in their home. Like the computer giant would later do, the carpet mills couldn’t imagine the world would change simply because it hadn’t yet.
Remember our socially awkward Catherine Evans? Well she eventually married, but apparently didn’t develop many other interests. She kept making bedspreads and began selling them to local general stores. Interest locally was good because of the low cost but there was demand from outside the community, partially due to a small national trend at the time toward folk art and goods. When demand became too great she taught others how to make the bedspreads and soon many households were laboriously turning out bedspreads. In fact the cottage industry came to be many households’ primary income and cars speeding down the road at night (heading to Dalton at least) were much more likely to be rushing more yarn and cotton to busy home businesses than carrying bootleg whiskey.
Could this have been one of the first modern examples of a collaborative business effort using an open-source platform?
The internet revolution started quietly. Everyone knows now that the internet had been around for years before two key events happened at just the right time. They were the introduction of the Windows operating system followed by the first web browser program. One was a commercial business product; the other was written and disseminated at no cost but both represented one thing—the arrival of technology that could deliver the product on demand to a wide audience in real time.
The Georgia carpet industry caught the notice of the carpet mills in the north but their potential competitiveness was easily dismissed. They weren’t following any established production models, they were using the wrong materials (cotton yarn instead of wool) and they were tufting instead of weaving. The mills allowed representatives from the south come in and tour their facilities and to take home ideas which they used to build their own mills. Growth was steady but slow, the technology that would be the equivalent of the web browser to the carpet industry was just about to arrive. That happened thanks to two men working separately who produced the first modern carpet tufting machines. These men, one named Carter and the other Cobble (if you find you need to know their first names you can certainly look it up—I recommend doing it online) developed machines that allowed mass output faster, requiring less labor and less cost. But even before Carter and Cobble arrived with their innovations resourceful people were purchasing used or broken Singer sewing machines and modifying them to take larger needles to punch though the heavy material and to handle the bigger scale. Like the internet pioneers would later do, the carpet innovators were quick to adopt new technology and when the technology couldn’t meet their demands they adapted that technology to keep up with their needs. And like the Big Computer Companies would later do, the Great Northern Mills saw the revolution coming, even helped it, and never recognized it for what it was until too late.
When a car is small, it’s maneuverable. It can fit places a big car can’t, it can turn on a dime and its costs (from manufacturing to gas to maintenance) are generally lower. If the fledgling carpet mills in Dalton were anything they were small. The very success of the Great Northern Mills meant that they couldn’t easily change their production methods.
They were locked into their investments. It was an issue of scale, and suddenly bigger wasn’t better. Once the technology was in place it took less than fifteen years for the carpet standard to shift to tufted over woven and for Dalton to eat the Great Northern Mills’ lunch. How did it happen? The smaller companies in the south weren’t afraid to try new business models. When one business plan would prove ineffective the mill would close and simply reopen in a few weeks with a new plan. There was very little capital and most businesses were run in little more than shacks. Despite their shoestring budgets, salesmen went out and convinced skeptical buyers that they were buying carpet from huge firms. When buyers would visit they would be shown the few large mills from a distance and be told that there was where their carpet was being produced.
Making the tufts of carpet stay firmly in place is now done in a process called heat setting. Back then the huge lengths of carpet were washed in very hot water and the cotton face threads would shrink and bind the tufts. Though there were many mills all in competition with each other, there were only a few independent businesses that could wash the carpet. So the various manufacturers were compelled to share the same limited resources and, as any college student knows, hanging out waiting on the tumble-dry cycle to finish is a great way to strike up a conversation. This environment fostered a natural collaboration. When one manufacturer made a significant innovation, it inevitably benefited everyone.
The greatest benefit of the new industry’s flexibility and quickness was represented in the materials used in the production of carpet. Beginning with cotton thread, manufacturers searched relentlessly for alternative raw materials that could be shipped and assembled cheaper, produced faster and could represent advantages over wool which was still the standard. While luxurious and long-lasting, wool was expensive, heavy and difficult to clean. It also comes from sheep. A manufacturer could build a woolen mill wherever he chose, but knew the farther away from the sheep he was, the more expensive the shipping costs of the raw materials. Materials like rayon and nylon were synthetic, cheaper and resisted staining. It could be produced anywhere there was the appropriate facilities. Companies like Dupont had produced synthetic material in huge quantities for the war effort, but in peacetime had difficulty finding a market. The arrangement for tufted carpet benefited both industries and instead of a traditional supplier-customer relationship, the resulting partnership led to greater innovation.
It was the same for backing materials. From using cotton duck which was the low quality filler in jackets and quilts to jute imported from India as the backing material, manufacturers experimented with every possible combination of materials. When civil unrest threatened the Indian jute supply the manufacturers quickly turned to domestically produced synthetic materials like latex and foam. Like a small car, they could match the shifts in the market turn for turn in a way that the larger companies couldn’t hope to achieve. It was a new world and the smaller platform, proved better at adapting.
Like the carpet revolution, the internet revolution waited patiently for the right technology, then never waited again. In ten years it so dominated the industry that Big Blue is now a consulting company and no one under thirty even remembers when they built computers. Punch cards and tape reels are either antique store curiosities or the punch line to a nerd’s party joke. Collaboration and flexibility were the key advantages and they allowed all manner of people to collaborate and be flexible in creative ways. Computer users working together quickly adopted new technology and then changed that technology when it didn’t do what they wanted it to do. Because there were no established models for “The Right Way to Go About This”, they were unafraid to try new ways of production, distribution and of completely re-imagining the concept of the supplier and the customer.
You know, it’s actually surprising that the Northern Mills and IBM didn’t see this coming. There were examples of this going all the way back to the dinosaurs-- who, even though they were the top of the food chain, lost out to smaller, more adaptable animals. Light, fast and flexible armies have triumphed over larger ones. But nevertheless, the revolutions always come as a surprise to the establishment.
There’s a new revolution, though it won’t look like what’s come before, the catalysts will be the same: flexibility and collaboration. And it’s still a matter of scale. The carpet revolution was a specific industry, the computer and internet revolution crossed all boundaries of business and industry. Each revolution happens faster and affects a larger group. The next revolution will be a collaboration of business and society. We’re already seeing the signs, voices are telling us the World is Flat, teenagers in the Netherlands post video opinions for consumption three minutes later in Oklahoma City. A part-time political junkie posts a blog that ends the campaign of a presidential candidate. A housewife in Knoxville orders a computer from a call center in India and parts are shipped from Singapore to be assembled in Nashville and three days after she hangs up the phone a package service is at her front door with her custom built computer. And a billion-dollar industry announces that they are committed to adopting practices at all levels of the organization that benefit the environment. The revolution is going to be a world where responsibility and profitability are no longer at odds. Society will stop being the customer and business will stop being the supplier. When both sides collaborate and benefit that’s a partnership and like the carpet industry before it, the relationship leads to even greater innovation.
Tricycle is part of what’s coming. The Tryk is a product that generates revenue, but it’s only a tool, and like any tool its value lies in the concept of what it can enable. Someone buys a hammer because they imagine a house, not because they just want a hammer. What Tricycle is selling are the tools for collaboration and flexibility. By freeing carpet manufacturers from physical samples you create flexibility, now a designer can work anywhere there’s a computer, without a case full of samples. And collaboration can only happen when both participants are speaking the same language. Tryks become that language by replacing words with pictures. And when landfills aren’t groaning under the weight of more carpet and when natural resources go untapped because the need isn’t there then society and business share the benefits of partnership.
It’s a small part of the revolution to be sure and this company’s contribution could be forgotten when that last piece of technology falls into place and the revolution stops waiting, starts picking up speed and moves the world. But how much would it be worth to claim even a small part as your own contribution?
