Non-Profit RugMark Adds Seven Licensees

Washington, DC, March 18, 2009--Seven North American rug companies recently joined RugMark to help put an end to exploitive child labor in the handmade rug industry.

NIBA Rug Collections and The Rug Studio, along with Apeiron, Custom Cool, Dai Living, Layne Goldsmith, and Sara Schneidman, are now licensees of RugMark, an independent inspection and monitoring program that confirms rugs are manufactured without the use of child labor and provides educational opportunities for children in India and Nepal.

New RugMark licensee NIBA Rug Collections produces hand-knotted, hand-tufted rugs from Nepal, India and Thailand, offered in eight showrooms around the country in addition to the NIBA showroom in Miami's hip Design District.

The Rug Studio, a high-end brand of prominent Canadian manufacturer The Lanart Rug Company, sells machine-made and handmade, customizable wool, sisal, seagrass, and synthetic area rugs.

· Philadelphia-based Aperion Design, offering unique hand made area rugs of Tibetan/New Zealand wool blend and Chinese silk.

· Custom Cool, based in Oyster Bay, N.Y., specializes in custom woven and tufted rugs made in India and Nepal.

· Irvington, Va.-based Dai Living offers luxurious hand-knotted Tibetan pashmina wool rugs handmade in Nepal using only vegetable dyes.

· For nearly a decade, Culpepper, Va.-based artist Sara Schneidman – who is perhaps best known for her successful line of greeting cards -- licensed her designs to other RugMark members.

·Textile artist and University of Washington professor Layne Goldsmith not only designs her own rugs, which are hand-knotted in certified factories in Nepal, but teaches her students how to do the same.

RugMark’s new industry partners brings the number of licensees to 62.