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We are excited to share that we will be posting a how-to on cleaning your treasured hand-knotted home rugs! Our detailed guide will help you with some easy home care as well as washing with various products and how to care for them. Please stay tuned!

Imagine your best friend, your dog or cat, left neglected, injured, and without food or shelter for days. This is the reality for thousands of street dogs and other animals in Nepal.

These loyal, loving creatures are neglected and forced to live in precarious conditions without anyone to care for them. Many yet are abused, tortured and left to die on the streets, and some are even killed inhumanely. That is where we intend to fill the gap of care and compassion. At Karnor, our social initiatives extend beyond human society. Starting around 2013, the Karnor staff and owners started the GAVA initiative to care for injured and sick animals. Since then, with the help of compassionate volunteers and donors, we have been able to provide food for street dogs and other animals, spay and neuter stray dogs, and even helped provide chemotherapy for cancer-stricken animals.

During the pandemic, the lockdowns resulted in major reduction of food sources for strays due to restaurant and store closures, so the Gava volunteers took extra measures to feed the stray dogs that were going hungry.

Today, GAVA is a registered non-profit, self-funded and supported by donors and run by our hardworking staff team from Karnor. We will strive to provide regular updates to the best of our ability through both social media and our website. Thank you to everyone who continues to make this possible. Namaste and Tashi Delek

Special thanks to Palden for your tireless work in this initiative, and Basanta and Karma for ensuring GAVA’s operation runs smoothly.

At Karnor, we have been producing high quality Tibetan rugs since 1991. This year marks our 30th year in operation, and we are proud to be able to consistently deliver top quality custom rugs woven in Kathmandu, now also offering Flatweave, Persian, and Moroccan rugs.

In the beginning, as with most Tibetan rug facilities in Nepal, we produced stock rugs to meet the high demand present worldwide after the carpet boom. As this plateaued and the rug market became more competitive, we ventured around the world to find new clientele and to enhance our production and services. This led to us start and later specializing in producing high quality custom rugs. We are proud today to serve clientele around the world, ranging from renowned interior companies and designers to artists and experimental textile specialists.

What makes Karnor special is our skilled workmanship from the weavers to the designers. In the close to 30 years with the business, our skilled team has honed their skills in meeting and exceeding client’s expectations, while keeping the focus on their vision. From 60 knots to 200 knot rugs, our weaving facility has produced masterpieces, and today we are proud to be able to say yes to some of the most complex projects.

Ultimately, we produce top-notch rugs, and not photos. While we can attempt any image or design, we urge our clients to keep their focus on the beauty of the rug and its own features as a priority. After all, the beauty of a rug is not just in its look, but the feeling it brings to a decor, and to your feet as you walk upon it.

Happy Nepali New Year 2078

From all of us at Karnor, we wish you a very happy Nepali New Year 2078. April 13 marked the new year 2078 in the Nepali Vikram Samvat calendar. The Tibetan rug craft has a centuries-old history, but the Tibetan rug industry as we know it today is intrinsically connected with Nepal. The Tibetan carpet boom in Nepal started after the Swiss Government helped Tibetan refugees establish rug production and export facilities in the 1970s. Nepal is also an ideal location for rug production due to her moderate weather, allowing rug production to continue unhampered through the year. In return, the carpet industry continues to be a major sector contributing to Nepal’s GDP and employment, having exported $69 million worth of rugs in 2019.

Read more about Nepal’s Vikram Samvat calendar system on Wikipedia.

A look at the past year, the effects of the pandemic in Nepal on the labour communities, and what Karnor and our generous clients have done to help provide relief and mitigate impacts of the virus and the worldwide lockdowns.

Dear friends,

We hope you are all well, and taking increased care during this pandemic. As many of you know, Nepal is in an unclear position as they have said they would reopen all flights starting August 17th earlier, and now it has apparently been postponed to August 31st due to a flare-up of cases in recent weeks. It is a tragic dilemma to face. The pandemic is dangerous but an economic crisis would be also very bad.

In some good news however, Russia is said to have developed the first Covid19 vaccine, and we have neighbouring India aiming for August 15th (Their independence Day) release of their vaccine, so we shall wait and see. All in all, it is good to see some inroads to battling this pandemic that is unprecedented in our lifetimes.

At Karnor, we had another staff meeting recently to reiterate the seriousness of this epidemic to all our staff and workers, and are looking into ways to increasingly limit contact, such as distributing reusable cloth masks to all staff and weavers, mandating its use at all times at work, and planning to have food and produce specially delivered to our weavers. From the beginning of the spread itself, we had already distributed rations to all our weavers, and offered paid partial leave during the initial stages.

Also, to keep our weavers’ community both safe and continuosly employed, we have woven some traditional Tibetan rugs recently, and are selling them at a marked-down price. These times are certainly a test of our mettle, from the heads of states to the workers in all industries and sectors. But we are far from giving up. We at Karnor are ready to prove that it takes more than a virus to break apart our tight-woven community.

Take care, and be safe,

From the Karnor family