Hand-Knotted vs. Hand-Tufted: What's the Difference?

"Handmade" covers a wide range of construction methods, and two of the most commonly confused are hand-knotted and hand-tufted. They can look similar in a photograph, but they're built very differently — and that difference affects durability, feel, and lifespan.

A hand-knotted rug is built one knot at a time on a loom, with the pile and the foundation created together as a single woven structure. There is no backing or glue holding it together — the knots themselves are the rug. This is the slower, more labor-intensive method, and it's what every SUNDUS rug is built from.

A hand-tufted rug, by contrast, is made by punching yarn through a pre-stretched fabric backing using a handheld tufting gun, then securing the yarn with a layer of adhesive and a secondary backing cloth. It's faster to produce and generally less expensive, but the adhesive backing means the rug can shed more over time and typically has a shorter lifespan.

Neither method is wrong — they simply serve different purposes and price points. But if you're investing in a rug meant to last decades and be passed down, the construction method is worth asking about directly, because it isn't always obvious from a listing photo alone.