Our Family Upholstery Business

Image Gallery ABOVE: An upholstery shop doesn't need fancy quarters? the Underwoods run their business from this $120 cottage.

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Twine, Tacks Dollars and Sense

Just like everyone else, we're feeling the rise in prices... especially in the cost of running our small business. Our materials and vinyls are already up 30¢ to $3.00 a yard, and on September 1, 1974 we received our new supply price list with a warning: "All prices subject to change without notice."

Here are the current costs of our most-used supplies, with the going rates back when we started our shop.

Although we didn't know it back then, our family's home business really began several years ago when Billy (my husband) and I upholstered some of our own furniture to save money. Friends and relations saw the results, and were soon asking us to do pieces for them. We felt we weren't skilled enough, but they insisted that we try . . . so, to supplement our income, I started recovering a couch or chair now and then in my spare time.

My first tools—a claw hammer, screwdriver, scissors and sewing machine—made for very slow progress. The living room doubled as my workshop and was always a mess. Then friends told friends about my sideline, and before long our porch was full of old ragged furniture. At that point my family complained about the clutter and insisted that if I must do such work I was going to have to move it out of the house.

At the time, my husband owned and operated a service station . . . not very profitably, what with the nine others in town. "Well," we thought, "if there's all this furniture around just begging to be refurbished, why not sell the business and open an upholstery shop?" We purchased an old one-room house for $120 to serve as quarters for the new enterprise, anti set out to get the information that would make our idea pay.

Our first step was to write the State Comptroller at Austin Texas, requesting an application for a store license and a sale tax number. (These cost us $10.00 a year and entitled us to sell material.) Then we stopped in at a shop in Brownwood and asked the owner where he bought his fabric. A phone call to the company he named—Durotex Supply in Dallas—brought us a visit from a salesman who turned out to be most helpful and encouraging. There was a great opportunity in the upholstering business, he told us, if we would work at it. He gave some material, vinyl sample books and a supply list, told which tools and findings we'd need to start with and quoted the going rates for furniture renovation in Dallas. These seemed high to us and we adjusted the prices to a realistic level for our small town.

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