Morning haze settles over a rural village outside Bhadohi, India, as men and women walk for miles down red-dust paths toward a loom strung tight with warp threads. A paper map guides the work: blue, blue, green, green. Six or seven inches of rug might be woven in a day, the rhythm steady, the artistry unchanged for centuries. Last fall, Angie Burge, owner of English Village Lane, stood among them, listening to the clack of wood and thread, realizing fully that her Birmingham-based business was also their livelihood. “We singlehandedly employ the entire village,” she says. “And without these people, we wouldn’t have a business.”
That business began in 2021 with grief and spaghetti sauce. During the pandemic, Angie lost the mentor who’d hired her into a corporate sales career. He was only 42. The shock was a wake-up call. At home with her two small children, she found herself fixated on rugs. She bought one after six months of contemplation, only to watch her toddler christen it with a bowl of spaghetti in the first week. “I froze,” she laughs, “thinking, why did I ever buy this?” But the stain lifted immediately with hot water, and her fascination deepened. She went room to room, replacing what she had with rugs that were not just decoration but anchors of a home.
She began to notice industry gaps—standard sizes that never quite fit, repeating patterns that dulled the eye, a lack of transparency about color and craft. When she commissioned her first custom rug through a husband-and-wife team in India, the process was maddening—hours spent guessing at shades across a computer screen. So she bought the same wool color poms the weavers used, then the same software, teaching herself to design in their language. What emerged was something new: rugs born of collaboration, rooted in history, and uniquely her own.
Every pattern in her downtown Birmingham showroom is exclusive. The bold geometrics, the softened plaids, the lavender and green that glow in her own den—all drawn from her hand or her team’s. She calls a frequent move “color-linking,” lifting the palette from one rug and reinterpreting it in another pattern or scale so adjoining rooms speak the same language. “Then, they go together without being matchy-matchy,” she says, noting that she likes using colors and patterns—for practicality—that hide crumbs.
The crumbs matter, because Angie built the company while raising two young children. For a year she packed and shipped every order herself, running to UPS before daycare pickup. She dismantled her dining table to photograph rugs in good light. She learned camera angles, then Instagram. Within months, 10,000 followers were watching. Within a year, she was shipping her custom rugs all over the world.
“It was a leap of faith,” Angie says of leaving her high-profile corporate job to pursue the vision that became English Village Lane. When her top sales rep said, “Take me with you,” she couldn’t do it right away — but two years later, she made it happen. Building a team, she says, has been one of the most rewarding parts of the business. “It’s surreal to look around and realize these people are building this with me. It feels like another dream realized—gratitude level one hundred.”
That sense of gratitude has become the through-line of her journey. She names her “saints of parents,” who moved from Atlanta to help. She names her husband, who picks up the slack when she travels to design markets in Dallas. She names her team, who hold down the fort while she goes out to share their story. And always, she names the artisans. In that one village where the work of their hands now supports an entire community, families can feed themselves with dignity. One of her vendors tells her often, “It’s God that brought us together.” Angie believes him.
“The interesting thing about gratitude is, be careful what you wish for,” she adds with a smile. “The business has grown so quickly, and we’ve been so blessed that it has been a lot on me. I’m extremely grateful to my team. I’m extremely grateful to our customers. But no one prepares you for a fast-growing business. We all wish for it, but you also have to bring scram packs (as in, get ready to move fast.) Inevitably, the ball is always going to drop somewhere—but with the right people in your life, there’s always a soft place to land.”
Then came a pinch-me moment. “I got a message from a Nobel Peace Prize winner’s designer,” she says. “They wanted rugs that matched their custom wallpaper. Two years later, they sent me photos of the rugs in their home.” Angie shakes her head. “I thought, wow, we’ve been put on the map.”
Angie measures success not by square footage or sales figures, but by people. “So many people have taken a chance on me,” she says. “Customers come, they love what we’re doing, and they want to be a part of it.” If a customer is ever unhappy with a custom rug, they remake it—no questions asked. If a designer entrusts her with a client, she delivers not just the product but the assurance that someone will stand behind it. “We want everyone to feel like they’re friends with us,” she says. “That’s our version of the girlfriend effect.”
The company continues to grow: two employees have become six, and the Birmingham showroom now has a sister location in Dallas. What began as a kitchen-table hustle has become an international business. But the core is still Angie, who talks about rugs with a spark that tells you they’re about much more than something to stand on. Her favorite is in her living room: a reinterpretation of her husband’s grandmother’s estate rug, once dark and traditional, now alive in lavender and soft blue. Across the open-concept space sits another rug, plaid, in matching tones. “They look at each other,” she says, smiling. “It’s history and legacy, but modern. And it’s ours.”
She could have set up shop anywhere—Homewood, Mountain Brook, or even Dallas—but she chose the city of Birmingham. Ninety-five percent of her sales are out-of-state, yet her showroom remains downtown by design. “We want our tax dollars to go here,” she says. “We believe in Birmingham.” The city, like her rugs, is an investment piece.
“God has given me everything I could possibly want,” Angie says. “An amazing family. An amazing team. A business that I love. We are so grateful for the people that got us here, and I don’t ever want to lose sight of that.”
The looms in India stretch tight every morning, lines of color waiting to be knotted. Angie’s Birmingham team lays out samples, pulls pillows off walls, measures rooms down to the inch. Somewhere between the two—the dust of Bhadohi and the brick streets of downtown—a rug takes shape. In wool, in pattern, and in gratitude woven underfoot.
Follow Angie’s journey and see her latest designs on Instagram @englishvillagelane.