Care
Care & Materials
Every mat and rug here is woven from cotton that has already been through a factory once. That is the point of them, and it is also why they behave a little differently to something made from new yarn. Here is exactly what is in them and how to keep them.
What it is made of
Short answer: cotton offcut yarn, and a thread to hold it together. There is nothing else in there.
| Pile | Reclaimed cotton offcut yarn. This is surplus and remnant yarn from garment manufacturing that would otherwise be waste. It is cotton-dominant rather than certified 100% cotton, because reclaimed stock is never perfectly uniform — expect a small fraction of blended fibre carried over from its first life. |
|---|---|
| Base | A woven cotton ground with a polyester binding thread. The polyester is structural: it is what stops a loose weave pulling apart in a washing machine. |
| Backing | None. No latex, no rubber, no PVC dots, no anti-slip coating. A latex backing is what makes most bath mats stiff after a year and unrecyclable forever. It also means these will slide on a polished floor — see below. |
| Dye | Mostly none. The colours are sorted from the incoming yarn rather than dyed to a target. That is why the palette is what it is, and why two mats of the same colour are close but not identical. |
| Weight | 2.2 lb to 2.6 lb for a mat, 2.8 lb for a deep diamond, 4.5 lb for a flatweave rug. Weight is the honest proxy for density here. |
| Absorbency | High, and it goes up after the first wash as the cotton opens. Drying time goes up with it — a deep diamond is the slowest thing we make. |
Washing
All of it is machine washable. None of it needs anything special. The one rule worth following is the first one.
- Wash it alone the first timeReclaimed yarn carries loose colour and loose fibre from its first life. The first wash sheds most of both. Wash the mat on its own, or with towels you do not care about, and the problem is over.
- Cold or 30°C, gentle cycleHot water is what shrinks cotton and flattens a pile. Cold is enough — these are not surgical linens.
- No bleach, no fabric softenerBleach strips the undyed colour. Softener coats the fibre and kills the absorbency you bought it for.
- Tumble low, or dry flatLow heat is fine and helps the pile recover. Line drying works but takes a day for the denser weaves. Do not dry a wet rug hanging over a rail — the weight pulls it out of square.
- Shake it out when it comes offTen seconds of shaking lifts a pile that a machine has compressed. This is the single step most people skip.
- Do not iron the pileIf a fringe needs settling, press the flat woven edge only, on low, with the pile face down.
By weave
They all wash the same way but they live differently. Pick your care by the one you own.
Diamond and deep diamond
The densest thing we make and the slowest to dry. Wash it on its own so the drum is not crowded, and give it a full tumble cycle. If it comes out looking compressed, shake it hard and leave it flat overnight — the pile comes back.
Open diamond
Airier, so it is quicker to dry and the easiest to keep in a small bathroom. Do not wring it — the open structure stretches when it is wet and heavy. Lift it flat out of the drum.
Dot and shaggy
The dot is the flattest, the fastest to dry and the most forgiving — it takes a normal cycle without complaint. The shaggy has the longest pile and sheds a little for the first two washes. Vacuum it with the beater bar off, or not at all.
Flatweave rugs. At 4.5 lb and 35 × 47 inches these need a machine with room to turn — a standard 7 kg drum handles one on its own, but not alongside a load of towels. If yours is smaller, wash it in a bath and roll it in a towel to get the water out before drying flat. A soaked flatweave is heavy enough to strain a drying rack, so put it on the floor on top of towels.
The floor underneath
There is no anti-slip backing, and we are not going to pretend that is only a virtue. On tile, sealed concrete or polished wood, a mat this light will move when you step off it wet.
Two fixes. A thin cut-to-size rug pad under it holds it still and costs a few dollars. Or put it on a floor that already has some texture — tile with grout lines grips perfectly well and the problem never comes up.
We would rather tell you this than sell you a mat that peels its own backing off in eighteen months.
What will happen, and what will not
Setting expectations is cheaper than handling a return.
- It will shrink a little. One to two per cent on the first wash, which on a 30-inch mat is under half an inch. It stops after that. Washing hot or tumbling hot will take more. The listed dimensions are the pre-wash size.
- It will shed for a week or two. Reclaimed cotton has shorter fibres than virgin cotton, so loose fluff works itself out over the first two or three washes and then stops. The shaggy sheds the most.
- The colour will settle. Saturated colours can release a little dye at first — the seville orange most of all. Wash it separately for the first two cycles and then treat it like anything else.
- The fringe will kink. It comes back with a comb or with fingers. It is a fringe, not a fault.
- It will not go stiff. There is no backing to harden and no coating to crack. Dense cotton gets softer with use, not worse.
- It will not smell of rubber. Nothing in it off-gasses, because nothing in it is synthetic apart from the binding thread.
Where it is made
Zoriqena is a Hong Kong company. We design the range, choose the colourways and set the specification; the weaving is done by our manufacturing partner, who sources the reclaimed yarn from garment-industry surplus. We are not the mill and we do not claim to be one.
If you want to know something specific about how a piece is put together, ask us. We will tell you what we know and say so plainly when we do not know.
Still deciding which weave?
The colour chart is the fastest way in — everything is shown at the same scale.