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The Queen Of Carpet Design

Nani Marquina, creator of ethical and extraordinary carpets

by Paul Wheatley | November 4th 2011 | 08:00 pm

Since starting her business in 1987, Nani Marquina has built a reputation not only as a creator of high-quality, thoughtfully designed rugs, but also as a business woman whose ethics pervade her whole company.

She was born in 1952 in Barcelona, and into a Spain in the grips of the Franco dictatorship. “I was studying right before Franco’s death [in 1975],” she says, “and I was involved in the youth protest movement … It was a very exciting time.”

The sense of liberation in much of post-Franco Spain engendered an exciting period of cultural flowering across the country. “Alongside the political explosion,” she says, “there was also a cultural explosion in all the creative arts.” Marquina grabbed her chance.

“I started with three designs, all very simple, all hand-crafted, sold in rug shops.” She purposely positioned her designs to contrast with the more 'traditional' designs found in Barcelona at the time. And it was the vivid colours and contemporary feel of Marquina’s rugs that quickly cemented her reputation as a leading designer. By 1987 (alongside a now long-departed business partner and with the help of a bank loan) she finally set up her own eponymously named firm.

However, Marquina, soon itching to innovate where possible, recognised that the rather limited skills of the rug-makers she employed consequently limited her as a designer. It became increasingly clear that she needed to find highly skilled craftspeople who could work with the intricacies of her designs. Her quest took her to the expert hands of rug-makers in India.

The easy option at this point would have been to farm the work out to India and worry only about the bottom line: the profit margin. This was never an option for Marquina. “Our rugs require very specific techniques to create and these techniques take some time to learn,” she says. It was clear from the outset that such skills need to be cherished, not exploited. This ethical dimension informs every level of the Marquina brand. She collaborates with Care and Fair, an organisation that aims to eradicate child labour from the “carpet manufacturing industry” across India, Nepal and Pakistan. Moreover, the production of Marquina rugs involves “natural, renewable and recyclable resources, such as wool, jute, cotton and silk”.

At the same time, she has refused to compromise on quality. “The rugs need to stand out; they need to have a wow! Factor,” she says. They certainly have that, and it is her constant attempt to push the boundaries – or as she has noted, to “reinvent” – rug design that mean she is very much in demand by artists and architects (Ron Arad and Tord Boontje, for example). With designs taking two to three years to come to fruition, though, she is very careful about with whom she collaborates. “We do a certain number of projects from ideas we receive from different designers or architects … If there is an interesting project, we do it.”

A question about whether she is more likely to take a commission if it is lucrative is met with a polite but clear retort: “It’s definitely not about how much money. If I like the design, if I’m inspired by the project, then that’s fine. If not, it’s unlikely to work.”

From the top down, this is no ordinary company. The message is clear: it’s about quality, it’s about innovation and it’s about ethics. “I don’t have a business only for profit,” she says pointedly. “I have a business to make designs that make me happy … But I want to make people with whom I collaborate happy, as well.”

Go to the Nani Marquina homepage