When Rosalind Rustigian was a teenager, her dad, Rusty, offered her some fatherly advice.
“He wrote me a note. It said I should keep my mouth closed and play Vicky the dunce more. His message was don’t show your cards, keep your eyes open, guard your flank and don’t let down your guard,” said Rustigian, who goes by Roz.
Business axiom or life lesson, she’s kept that message tucked in the back of her mind since she took over V. George Rustigian Rugs Inc., doing business as Rustigian Rugs, in the decades after her father died. Today, the company carries rugs from all over the world, as well as custom rugs and carpeting, with many repeat clients.
In a YouTube video, Rustigian attributes her long success to sturdy relationships with interior designers and a strong retail presence.
“We stand with feet in both worlds,” she said.
Rustigian never planned to go into the family business. Her father was a 1928 Brown University graduate forced to drop out of Harvard Law School when the stock market collapsed in 1929. He needed to support himself and his mother, and he’d worked in the rug business in New York and New Orleans. Using his family’s contacts, he began buying and borrowing rugs, which he then sold out of his house on Benefit Street in Providence. Rustigian Rugs debuted in 1930 in the depths of the Great Depression.
Rusty Rustigian was a character, and shrewd.
“He was debonair and irascible, a lady’s man and man’s man,” Rustigian said. “He was an avid sports fan, the perfect father for a little kid. He taught me how to throw a football and a baseball and took me to the beach. I was the smallest in my class, and he’d tell me to stop complaining about being little, that the bigger they are, the harder they fall. People develop character in a lot of ways.”
By all accounts, Rustigian had a colorful upbringing as an only child. The garage of the Benefit Street home became a showroom. The separate building that had housed Gertie, the family horse, was transformed into a dry room for cleaning rugs, and it wasn’t uncommon to see carpets draped on fences outside the house or hanging from special railings.
“Most people don’t enter their home wondering if their possessions will still be there,” Rustigian said. “Customers would come upstairs and buy the family rug. It was not at all unusual.”
But colorful childhood or not, Rustigian was ready to move on after high school. She majored in urban studies at Connecticut College and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1973. As a field, it appealed to her. It grouped together economics, sociology, contemporary history and literature, as well as micro, macro and urban planning.
“I got a snapshot of the world,” she said.
Following graduation, she tended bar at local spots such as The Black Pearl in Newport.
“I was the fastest bartender. I don’t do anything slowly,” she said.
After a couple of years, Rustigian opted for Cornell University for graduate school and a master’s in hotel administration. From there, she spent two years in New York in a hotel division of the real estate department at Prudential Insurance. It was the late 1970s.
“I loathed every single minute,” she said. “I didn’t like the hours or the dress code or the politics, and the chauvinism was unbelievable.”
In 1980, when her dad died, Rustigian came back to Rhode Island.
“I had no intention of running the company, but I started answering the phone. Then I was asked, ‘Can you do this?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ and that’s how it went.”
When a former bank building in Providence’s Fox Point neighborhood came on the market a year later, she decided to buy it and move the business there. She was 28 and didn’t have enough money to purchase it outright.
“It was very hard to be a female in business back then,” Rustigian said.
Financing could be complicated and interest rates hovered around 20%, but she prevailed. The elegant red brick building that became home to Rustigian Rugs still presides over the familiar corner of Wickenden and Governor streets.
After moving into the building, Rustigian modernized the company’s operations, added a computerized system, inventory and customer service. It allows her staff of 10 to keep track of purchases, cleanings and repairs over several decades, with sales records and photos.
“I would never in a million years think my background in sociology and urban studies would suit me in the rug business,” she said.
When she’s not on buying trips overseas, Rustigian spends the day billing, working with clients and moving inventory, then heads home to the Benefit Street house where she grew up.
Art, like the rugs created by weavers in India or Afghanistan, doesn’t stem from the idea of making something pretty, she says, adding that most artifacts are created either for practical use or to be sold.
“I love my suppliers,” she said. “I’d live in Turkey if I could. I’m a buyer. I’m not sold to.”
