It’s a trade that as old as Bristol itself - for centuries people here have made or refurbished furniture. But while many might think work as an upholsterer is something consigned to the 19th or 20th century, the boss of a city firm has told Bristol Live how the opposite is true - business is booming so much that they are looking to expand.
And Ryan Ball, the boss of South West Upholstery, said they are desperate for people to join them and need to recruit five apprentices a year to help keep the trade alive in the city.
While many businesses were hit hard by the covid pandemic and the slow recovery from lockdown, Mr Ball said his business was lucky - and is actually busier than ever before.
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Tucked away on an industrial estate on the southern edge of Bedminster before it becomes the Western Slopes and Knowle West is South West Upholstery. It’s a family firm with strong roots in South Bristol which was started by Ryan Ball when he was just 14 or 15 in a shed in the garden of his grandfather’s home in Hartcliffe.
His granddad John was a bus driver who learned how to ‘trim’ the buses, and worked for First Bus for years as a bus trimmer - upholstering and reupholstering the seats. With his son Andy and grandson Ryan, they started a little hobby, teaching Ryan the trade, working at the weekend doing a bit of upholstery.
Ryan was desperate to turn that into a proper business and, against the advice of both his grandfather and father, pitched for work fitting out buses for real - and got responses and customers Within a couple of years he’d quit business studies at college to try to make it as a coach upholsterer, and learned hard lessons about business in the real world instead.
“I remember I had some horrible experiences, but I learned a lot from it,” he said. “I would go to visit potential clients and I was still in school or maybe just 17, 18 or 19. I’d arrive and you could see it, they would be like ‘who the hell are you?’ or ‘where have you come from?’ so I was introduced from a young age to lots of highs and lows, getting pricing right, talking to customers. I learned an awful lot,” he said.
This was while he was still at Withywood School, and then City of Bristol College - albeit briefly. The ‘firm’ as it was then, moved from the shed to a space upstairs at his uncle’s scaffolding yard on the Caters Road industrial estate between Bishopsworth and Hartcliffe, as the 1990s became the 2000s.
And then it slowly grew, moving around many of the industrial areas that are still a jobs lifeline for South Bristol - from Caters to South Liberty Lane, then to Hengrove. Ryan moved into his 20s and expanded the business, fitting out buses and coaches, trains and diversifying into other upholstery - bars, clubs, pubs, and even hospitals and health centres.
The recession of 2008 hit the firm hard, and they downsized to survive, growing gradually again into the 2010s with a growing reputation for quality and speed. The growth of another South Bristol firm helped too - from the early days they worked with the two entrepreneurs who set up the country’s first Lounge - the hybrid cafe, bar, restaurant and pub that has defined the hospitality industry in the 21st century so far.
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That first Lounge was on North Street in Ashton, and all the ones since have been fitted out by Ryan and his team at SWU. The Lounge guys then started the Cosy Club chain, and took SWU with them there too - next time you sit on one of those long upholstered bench seats at a Lounge, or sink into a sofa at a Cosy Club, it will have been created on Novers Lane, on the hill where Bedminster becomes Knowle West.
Ryan proudly drops the fact that McDonald's also call on them to fit or refit its restaurants, and away from their commercial side, the business of upholstering people’s beloved sofas is also booming. The pandemic provided even more opportunities.
“It was really weird, as everyone will remember,” Ryan said. “Everything just stopped, didn’t it? We just sent everyone home and sorted out furlough and stuff, and thought ‘well that’s it’. The hospitality industry obviously stopped, but then two weeks in we got a call from one of our existing clients. They had just got a contract to bring in those mobile units that they were going to convert into mobile testing units for covid. The furniture they came with was all cloth, and had to be wipeable to avoid spreading the virus. They asked if we could help, and we could,” he added.
He brought back in a skeleton crew, but then business began to grow again - only this time it wasn’t the Cosy Club who wanted comfy chairs or bench seating, it was the frontline in the battle against Covid-19.
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“We had doctors’ surgeries whose waiting rooms all had cloth or material seating, and everything had to be wipeable to meet the guidelines,” said Ryan. “So that was what we did.”
And lockdown also brought more boom to the upholstery world. “People were spending a lot of time at home. They still are. What we found was that there was a boom in people wanting to upcycle and recycle and spruce up their homes.
“It’s fashionable now to re-use stuff. If you want a new sofa, not to buy a new one but have it reupholstered. If someone has got a sofa they spent £4,000 on and it’s a bit old now, they will think twice about buying another new one for that money, but they could spend £1,000 getting it reupholstered and as good as new with us,” he added.
“We do smile because we see everyone talking about the environment and waste and recycling - when we’ve been doing exactly that for years. Now we’re trendy,” he joked.
And there was a third impetus behind the upholstery boom - the harsh realities of the hospitality market. “We’re finding that a lot of bars and clubs and pubs have taken the time they spent closed because of Covid to look at refurbishing, especially the independents.
“So someone like Lounge, or a landlord with one or two pubs, has put the investment they got into refurbishing their interiors, whereas perhaps the big chains have been cautious. Where a landlord has got the freedom to invest they have, because they know the hospitality industry is struggling and they have to improve to survive,” he explained.
All this means is that Ryan and the team working hard in the large workshops in the unit - compartmentalised by walls of thick, towering, hanging strips of transparent plastic - need help. “We’re looking to take people on all the time. And I don’t care what age they are,” said the man who started the business aged just 15. “They could be 16 or 60. If they’ve got the skills then that’s great. If they don’t, we can train them,” he said, explaining how the firm is looking to set up an in-house apprenticeship scheme, with a training area set aside.
“The only place where you can go to college to learn upholstery is in Nottingham, so we’ve been working closely with them. It involves going for a week every month to Nottingham, but we’re hoping to increasingly train people right here. It’s not just school leavers, we’ve taken on people in their 20s looking to learn a trade.
“It’s strange because upholstery is seen as a trade that’s old-fashioned, no one wants to learn it. But it’s a booming trade, at least for us. And there’s so many different ways to go on and grow from it. We’ve got people here who came to join us on the floor and they’re now running their own projects fitting out a new Lounge and so on,” he added.
Lockdown also saw a fundamental shift in the business too - and it was one that was common among many businesses in all different kinds of fields. Before Covid-19, SWU had the big unit on Novers Lane and, as a public front for customers, two stores - one in Clifton and one on North Street in Bedminster. When Covid hit and they had to close, they never reopened. What happened instead was that customers - and therefore SWU - moved online.
“We’re taking orders from all over the country. We’ve got really good at being able to give an accurate quote just from someone sending in a picture of their item of furniture and what they want doing to it,” said Ryan. “Now, we are dealing with more domestic customers than ever, but the only actual physical contact we have with them is a delivery driver knocking on their door.”
It’s 25 years since the teenage Ryan pestered his grandfather and dad to turn their little hobby of restoring coach seats into a business. And while the firm has long since left the bus and coach industry behind, they still do the same work sometimes. “We will still do vintage coaches. There are lots of people whose passion is to restore vintage coaches and train carriages, and we do that upholstery work. We’ve got the contract, for example, to maintain the seats on the vintage bus that’s in the M-Shed,” said Ryan, with a smile. They’ve come a long way from the shed in Hartcliffe, but actually, not that far at all.
“We’re still the same company as we were 20 years ago. The most important thing is that we’re all one big team, and everyone feels like we’re all working together, no matter what your job is. That’s so important. I could go down there onto the floor now and start shouting at people but what would that achieve? If I lost them, where would it leave me? I’d have no staff. We have lots of people who come here who have been badly treated in their previous jobs, and found here that the priority is making it a nice place to work, and hopefully that’s what it is,” he added.
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