Why we put a person's name on every label

Walk into most carpet shops and the label says a town and a country. Occasionally a century. Never a person. The carpet took someone fourteen months, and the trade has decided that person is a manufacturing detail.

The standard defence is that the supply chain makes it impossible: a carpet passes through a village agent, a regional wholesaler and an exporter before it reaches a shop, and by then nobody knows who tied the knots. That is true, and it is a description of a choice, not a constraint. We fly to the workshop and buy from the bench.

If you cannot name the weaver, you cannot say what you paid them. The two facts go missing together, and only one of them is embarrassing.

What naming changes

• It fixes the price at the weaver's number, because a named person's rate is a fact we would have to defend.
• It makes repairs better: the workshop that wove a piece can restore it invisibly, and we know which workshop that is.
• It gives the buyer something the object cannot fake. Provenance is the whole difference between a hand-knotted carpet and a very good copy.

The awkward part

Naming weavers means we cannot buy from anyone whose conditions we have not seen, which rules out a great deal of cheap stock and some very beautiful pieces we would like to have sold. Our catalogue is smaller than it could be. That is the trade-off, and we would rather show you the whole of it than the parts that flatter us.