Mohawk Industries began with 14 used looms and a family named Shuttleworth

In 1878, four Shuttleworth brothers had 14 used Wilton looms shipped from Great Britain to Amsterdam, New York, and set them up in an empty factory. The family had come over from England three years earlier with their father, William, and started a carpet mill in the Hudson Valley. After William died, the sons moved the work to Amsterdam.

Their carpet was wool, and it was a hard business. Even with mechanization, carpetmaking took massive, complicated machinery and a great deal of labor. Wool production was unpredictable, and costs swung with it. For most families carpet was a luxury. Shipments per household peaked at four square yards in 1899 and did not pass that mark again until the mid-1960s.

That mill is the root of Mohawk Industries, the flooring manufacturer headquartered in Calhoun, Georgia. Mohawk has been a public company since 1992 and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker MHK. Over three decades it bought its way from carpet into ceramic tile, laminate, vinyl and wood. The deal list tells only part of the story. Underneath it is a family of wool weavers in New York who struggled when the carpet trade moved south, and a lawyer who took the carpet business private. Later came an executive who arrived through one of Mohawk’s early acquisitions and became its chief executive in 2001.

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For its first century, the business belonged to the Shuttleworths. Three generations ran it. The family incorporated in 1902 as Shuttleworth Brothers Company, a step probably prompted by a change of generations at the top. Its reputation grew after 1908, when it introduced a carpet pattern called Karnak. The pattern was so popular that weavers worked four and five years without changing the color or the pattern on their looms.

In 1920 the family merged with another Amsterdam carpetmaker, McCleary, Wallin and Crouse, and took the name Mohawk Carpet Mills. The combined company was the country’s only weaver with a full line of domestic carpets, spanning Wilton, Axminster, Velvet and Chenille weaves. It kept experimenting. Mohawk created the industry’s first textured design, called Shuttlepoint, and its first sculptured weave, Raleigh. It also developed Woven Interlock, described in company histories as the first successful application of the knitting principle to making carpet.

The trouble came from Dalton, Georgia. In the late 1940s, housewives there had built a small tourist trade in tufted bedspreads. Machines were soon developed to tuft carpet the same way, inserting loops of fiber into a jute backing. These broadloom machines made carpet many times faster than older methods. Wartime limits on wool had also pushed research into synthetic fibers such as nylon, which were cheaper to produce and steadier in supply. By 1968, tufted carpet made up 90 percent of all carpet sales.

In 1956 Mohawk merged with Alexander Smith, Inc. to form Mohasco, the largest carpet company in the world. The timing was poor. Alexander Smith brought heavy debt and a large inventory of outdated carpet just as imports gained ground. Lower tariffs in the 1950s let importers grow from 2 percent of the U.S. market to 25 percent by the end of the decade. Mohasco began moving its manufacturing south, into the Carolinas and eventually Georgia.

Herbert L. Shuttleworth II, the third and last member of the family to lead the business, steadied it enough to buy Firth Carpet in 1962. Then he reached for furniture. Starting in 1963, Mohasco acquired nine furniture makers by 1970. Two years later, carpet made up only about a quarter of its sales. Forbes dubbed the company the “GM of the living room,” a nod to General Motors.

Carpet still had one more big moment. In the early 1970s, Mohasco’s sculptured, brightly colored Canyon Paradise carpet, sold in shades such as orange and gold, became the industry’s all-time best-seller. When tastes shifted to muted colors, the company failed to follow. Forbes compared it to “those clothing companies that were caught with warehouses of polyester leisure suits.” A recession and price controls made it worse. By 1975, Burlington Industries had passed Mohasco in carpet production. Carpet manufacturing at the Amsterdam site had already ended by 1968.

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In 1980 Mohasco hired David Kolb as chief executive. He was an attorney who had served as comptroller and director of the nylon carpet fibers division at Allied Fibers, and his job was to turn around a company that was not making money. He ran a five-year modernization of plants and systems, cut costs and developed new managers. He moved the headquarters from Amsterdam to Atlanta, closer to Dalton, which by then had become known as the carpet capital of the world. He shifted the company toward higher-margin products and sold more directly to retailers. The last corporate offices left Amsterdam by 1987.

In 1988, Kolb took the carpet division private in a $120 million leveraged buyout. The carpet business was split off from Mohasco and became Mohawk Industries. Mohasco’s remaining assets were sold, and that company was later dissolved.

Mohawk went public in 1992, first on the Nasdaq under the ticker MWK, and started buying. Horizon Industries came that year, Karastan Bigelow in 1993. The industry was consolidating fast: more than 300 carpet producers in 1980 shrank to about 100 by the mid-1990s. In 1995 Mohawk held 17 percent of the wholesale carpet and rug market, behind Shaw Industries at 26 percent. By 2000 it had completed a dozen soft-surface acquisitions, and sales had grown tenfold since the public offering.

One of those deals brought in the man who would lead the company for decades. Jeffrey S. Lorberbaum had joined Aladdin Mills in 1976, served as its vice president of operations from 1986 and become its president and chief executive in February 1994. A month later, when Mohawk acquired Aladdin, he joined Mohawk’s board. He became Mohawk’s president and chief operating officer in January 1995, its chief executive in January 2001 and its chairman in May 2004.

Under Lorberbaum, Mohawk made a purchase with some history in it. In 2003, Mohawk and W. L. Ross & Company won their bid for substantially all the assets of Burlington Industries, the company that had overtaken Mohasco in carpet production nearly three decades earlier. Mohawk’s share was the Lees Carpet division, a commercial carpet maker with operations in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Glasgow, Virginia. In announcing the deal, Lorberbaum singled out Lees’ sales force as one of the most respected in the industry.

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The bigger leap had come a year earlier. The 2002 purchase of Dal-Tile made Mohawk the leading ceramic tile provider in North America. Dal-Tile’s chief financial officer, W. Christopher Wellborn, joined Mohawk’s board with the deal, ran Dal-Tile for Mohawk and became the company’s chief operating officer in 2005. It became a pattern. When Mohawk bought the Belgian laminate maker Unilin in 2005, giving it the leading laminate position on both sides of the Atlantic, Frans De Cock, one of Unilin’s managing directors, joined the board and became president of Unilin. Filip Balcaen, who had led the sheet vinyl and luxury vinyl tile maker IVC Group, joined the board in 2016, after Mohawk bought IVC in 2015.

Laminate also brought an installation detail Mohawk still points to: the company credits its Uniclic system with turning laminate into a floor homeowners could put down themselves. The acquisitions kept coming: Columbia Wood Flooring in 2007, the Italian tile maker Marazzi and the laminate brand Pergo in 2013, Australia’s Godfrey Hirst in 2018, Brazil’s Eliane the same year. In 2023 Mohawk bought Elizabeth in Brazil and Vitromex in Mexico, a country where ceramic tile is the dominant flooring choice.

Some of the spending went inward. In 2016 the company put $672 million into its own operations, the most in its history to that point, then set a new record with $906 million in 2017. That same year it bought a talc mine in Texas to supply its ceramic production. In 2021 it introduced a waterproof wood floor, a category the company says it pioneered.

Also in 2017, Mohawk bought a nylon polymerization plant in Alabama, pushing its carpet business further back toward its raw material. Nylon was one of the synthetics that helped push wool carpet aside. A century earlier, the Shuttleworths had built their mill on wool and 14 secondhand looms.