Stephanie Odegard, photograph by Mark Luinenburg

Luxurious, handcrafted Tibetan rugs hang from the walls and cover the floors of the Michael Sydney showroom in the downtown Minneapolis warehouse district. Their quiet, minimalist designs and subdued colors draw a visitor deeper inside the two-story brick space. The plush carpets evoke elegance, wealth, and exclusivity; grazing the fingers across the silky wool, plunging them deep into the pile, one struggles to name this sensation. It can be only one thing: guilty pleasure.  

Stephanie Odegard (B.A. ’69) understands this feeling— save for the guilt.

The founder, CEO, and chief designer of Odegard, Inc., dug her own hands deep into the Oriental carpet industry two decades ago and wove a new path through it, becoming one of the industry’s most celebrated designers. New York–based Odegard, Inc., now employs more than 10,000 carpet workers in Nepal at four manufacturing sites. The company has 70 dealers and showrooms in six U.S. cites, including Michael Sydney in Minneapolis, and in Milan, London, and Zurich. Odegard maintains a hands-on relationship with all parts of the business, drawing new carpet ideas on a sketch pad as she jets around the globe, overseeing production in Nepal, and designing a new line of home accessories, including India-influenced hand-carved marble furniture.

Her business acumen, honed on projects around the world, has helped to ensure the survival of indigenous crafts and to promote sustainable economic development. A resolute opponent of child labor, Odegard was the first American rug importer to join the RugMark Foundation, a nonprofit organization of manufacturers and dealers seeking to end child labor in the rug industry. She is its biggest U.S. contributor and most high-profile advocate.

An estimated 300,000 children work illegally in the rug industry in India, Pakistan, and Nepal. Many are kidnapped or sold into debt bondage to work 15-hour days in unhealthy and unsafe conditions. RugMark inspects manufacturing sites and certifies rugs that were made without child labor. Funded by its member importers and retailers, it also helps rehabilitate

A worker ties bales of wool shorn from long-haired sheep that graze in the Tibetan highlands. Photographs courtesy of Odegard, Inc.

and educate former child laborers.

Lack of education perpetuates the poverty that fuels the child labor industry, Odegard explains. “Those with an education have a greater degree of participation in and control over the world around them. This is how social development takes root and how lasting change is created.”

Growing up in Minneapolis, Odegard, then Stephanie Bundul, admired the missionaries she learned about in her church. “I just wanted to go overseas,” she says. “I knew those people got to go to Africa and help people.”

At the University of Minnesota Odegard studied humanities. Upon graduating, she landed a job at Dayton- Hudson Corporation, where she learned trend forecasting, merchandising, and inventory management. After four years, she says, “I just started to feel like there was more I wanted to do with my life and now was the time to do it.”

She and her husband, Mark Odegard, moved to Grand Marais, Minnesota, and opened a yarn shop where she taught classes in needlepoint, knitting, and weaving. But when friends began bringing home stories from their volunteer missions abroad, Odegard convinced her husband to join the Peace Corps with her.

With her background in merchandising, the Peace Corps sent Odegard to Fiji to help develop an export market for handicrafts. Once she began traveling the country’s 300-plus islands, however, she discovered the craft industry was little more than tourist trinkets. The islands’ truly indigenous crafts—mats made from pandanas leaves, dyed cloth from pounded mulberry bark, and carved war clubs and cannibal forks—were discouraged by missionaries and dying out. “That’s when I started to learn that although missionaries probably do a lot of good in many places, they can also bring about a lot of change that is not necessarily totally resulting in good,” Odegard says.

With about $50 of her own money, Odegard began purchasing handcrafted items and selling them to other travelers. Then a small grant from the Fijian government enabled her to open a store, and the growing market encouraged young people to learn traditional crafts. Fiver years later, the crafts industry

Odegard helped rug manufacturers develop improved vegetable dyes.

was thriving, in large part due to Odegard’s efforts; the store Odegard founded still exists, she says, and artisans trained there have gone on to open their own shops.

Odegard’s marriage ended after four years. But she left Fiji in 1981 with a valuable lesson. “I learned that this is the way to put money into poor people’s hands. To ask them to make something they’re proud of and can relate to,” she says. “Companies and aid organizations, I’d seen it all over the world, they’d give up and say, ‘These people don’t understand. They drink.’

“What I was doing nobody was rejecting. Nobody was taking the money and drinking it away. . . . [They] put money back into their homes, to building their own quality of life, their children’s education. So I decided this [sustainable development] was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”

A few months later, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization recruited Odegard for a project in Jamaica. Odegard helped set up stores called Things Jamaican and helped develop an outdoor marketplace in the courtyard of Kingston’s Devon House, one of the country’s most well-known cultural landmarks. Each shop carried a theme of Things Jamaican, such as ice cream or furniture. With Odegard’s help, Things Jamaican even found an American market at Macy’s San Francisco store.

After three years, Odegard’s plans to move back to the United States were put on hold when the World Bank offered her a position developing the wool import industry in Nepal. Everything she’d learned about socially responsible economic development, merchandising, and design was about to come together in the Katmandu Valley.

Located high on the southern slopes of the Himalayas, Katmandu is the center of Nepal’s carpet industry. Commercial carpet manufacturing began there in the 1960s with the influx of Tibetan refugees after China annexed Tibet in 1959.

But by the 1980s, weavers in Nepal were struggling to meet demand because they couldn’t get enough wool. The carpets are woven with wool imported from Tibet. Sheep that graze in the Tibetan highlands have exceptionally long hair with a high lanolin content

A craftswoman on a loom makes a carpet with the Rosalia design.

that gives it a silky sheen and great durability.

Odegard arrived in Nepal in 1986 after a three-month stop in New York to learn about the rug industry. Her job would be to help stabilize and expand the market for wool imports to support the growing carpet manufacturing industry. “All the wool was [imported] on a barter system with Tibet and it was corrupt,” she explains.

Odegard worked with Nepalese, Tibetan, and Chinese officials to put wool on general open trade, moving it to a cash system and opening the door for greater imports. She also began to work with manufacturers directly to develop improved vegetable dyes and more environmentally friendly manufacturing processes. In 1987, after helping to broker a new trade agreement on wool, Odegard went into business for herself, eager to put to work all of the social and economic development principles she’d been building on for the past decade.

She also had a design epiphany that would eventually make her carpets some of the most prized in the United States and Europe. “I started looking at those rugs and thinking if I took away the borders and all of the [busy patterns] that are overlaying this beautiful weaving and the wool, I’d like them,” she says. “So that’s what I did, and I sort of turned a hand-knotted oriental design into more of a fabric design.”

Her design aesthetic changed the industry. Before Odegard came along, it was impossible to find a handmade rug in a contemporary design. She created and developed the market for contemporary, high-end Tibetan carpets, leading House & Garden to describe her as “a favorite of the world’s most sought-after interior designers.” Odegard’s rugs now grace the floors at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Chambers Hotel in New York, and the homes of celebrities, including actress Julianne Moore.

“It’s just fascinating to see how she’s opened the doors, essentially, to people taking inspiration from all different sources,” says Gary Coles-Christensen, president of G. Coles-Christensen, Ltd., an oriental rug retail store in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and co-chairman of RugMark USA. Odegard’s designs draw

Stephanie Odegard (second from right) examines the wares of rug suppliers.

from nature, art, and architecture and pull in elements from designs used in traditional Indian dhurries and Japanese kimonos.

One thing that set Odegard’s rugs apart was quality. She began working with Tibetan weavers in Nepal whose rugs used 100 knots per square inch, about 40 knots more than conventional rugs and a quality that most importers thought wasn’t commercially viable. But Odegard saw an opportunity to make rugs that would appeal to a high-end market. She invested everything she had, about $20,000, in manufacturing her own collection and then shipped the rugs back to the United States where she set up a showroom in her one-bedroom Manhattan apartment.

“And of course, nobody came,” she recalls wryly. Those who did were skeptical. The work was good, they admitted, but the designs were too minimal to appeal to most buyers. Eventually, through sheer doggedness, she sold all of her collection, along with the textiles and Indian dhurries she’d collected. “Everything I could, just to stay alive,” she says. “I stuck with it somehow, even though I didn’t have any customers.”

Ultimately, she found an established importer willing to work with her and then a German partner. Her business grew, and as it did, she began to tell people the story of the Tibetan weavers and the rich, luxurious quality of the 100-knot process, a practice that is now becoming an industry standard.

Creating a demand for high-priced modern hand-knotted carpets, Odegard was also able to improve conditions for carpet workers. In Nepal, employees and their families are provided health care, one of her suppliers has a day care and a school on the premises, and another is reducing air pollution with the only smoke-free boiler in Katmandu. Lynn Thomas, former executive director of Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, which operates Sankhu-Palubari Community School outside Katmandu, visited one of Odegard’s facilities in February 2006 and met many of the workers there. “Everything was very high quality in terms of cleanliness and the way it’s laid out. . . . It’s a high standard, certainly in Nepal terms.”

While Odegard’s designs have won national

Children eat breakfast at a RugMark-sponsored day care.

awards, including House & Garden’s Best of the Best in 2004 and 2005, she has earned almost as much recognition for her work on behalf of RugMark, speaking out against child labor.

“She was, if you will, the first penguin off the ice,” says Cindi Janetzko, acting director for RugMark North America. “She jumped first and said, ‘Yes, I’m going to be certified and it’s the right thing to do.’ ”

Odegard first became aware of the child labor issue in Nepal in the early 1990s, when U.S. Senator Tom Harkin from Iowa sponsored a bill to require all imports to be free of child labor. A member of the Oriental Rug Importers Association child labor committee, Odegard was surprised that the organization wanted to fight the bill. “I was saying, ‘Why shouldn’t we tell them we don’t have child labor, because we don’t have child labor?’ ”

She investigated and found that child labor had crept into Nepal carpet industry as the demand for labor grew. That’s when she joined RugMark. “I wanted to help people,” she says simply. Odegard thought everyone else would, too, but her efforts to enlist other importers often got a cold reception. “First of all, they don’t think it’s important, and they don’t want to ask questions. . . . They make all kinds of excuses.”

That attitude persists, Coles-Christensen says. “There’s this irrational, superstitious belief that by bringing attention to it you’re actually going to drive away buyers.” But, he says, the reverse has proven true. “Everybody who’s gotten involved with it, whether it’s marketing partners or importers, they’ve just seen an exponential increase in their business.”

Thanks largely to its certification and inspection program, RugMark estimates that since 1995 the use of child labor in Nepal’s carpet industry has dropped from 11 percent to 3 percent. While other reasons may account for the wild success of those businesses that do not use child labor, admits Coles-Christensen, “I truly believe that when you’re doing the right thing, you get rewarded for that.”