Three options. Only one actually works for your business.
Four upholstery worlds, one workshop, and the throw-it-out instinct kills most jobs
Upholstery is four businesses sharing a workshop: residential restoration (the emotional jobs, grandmother's wing chair or the heirloom dining suite, $800 to $4,500 a piece, lifetime customer if you do it right), commercial banquette and cafe seating (the volume work that pays the rent, $200 to $600 per linear metre, long lead time but predictable), auto and marine (classic Holdens, Mustangs, boat squabs and yacht cushions, premium-margin specialist work), and medical or aged-care vinyl recovers (hospital chairs in Crypton or Pelle Leather, contract work with stable repeat). Each one needs a different customer to find you. Meanwhile the average renovator's first instinct is to throw the chair on the kerb and buy something new from IKEA, the cafe owner doesn't know recover is half the price of replace, and the AUA-member upholsterer with thirty years on the bench sits silent online.
Good upholstery marketing is the four niches kept separate, with the fabric and finish knowledge that justifies your price loud across every page. A residential-restoration hub with one suburb page per area you work, before-and-after galleries from the heirloom rebuilds, the fabric houses you carry (Warwick, Mokum, Zepel, Profile), and an honest 4 to 8 week lead time. A commercial-banquette hub aimed at cafe and restaurant owners with a 'half the cost of replace' price comparison. An auto-and-marine page for the classic-car restoration enthusiast. An aged-care and hospital vinyl page for the procurement officer doing contract work. AUA membership called out on the home page. Get the four niches ranking separately, get three local cafes and one aged-care facility on a repeat-work footing, and the bench books three months out.
Six agents, working in your accounts.
Account Lead, Web, SEO, Advertising, Social Media, and Content. One platform, one bill, you approve the work.
Builds your annual plan around which of the four niches actually pays (residential restoration, commercial banquette, auto and marine, medical and aged-care vinyl) rather than chasing every upholstery keyword. Briefs the other agents so the suburb pages, the ads, the social grid and the hospitality outreach all push toward the niches you genuinely want more of, not the ones that fight on price.
Imports your existing site so you stop paying for hosting plus a CMS subscription, and makes spinning up a new suburb or niche page a five-minute job. Ships separate hub pages for each niche (residential restoration, commercial banquette, auto and marine, aged-care vinyl), with niche-specific schema, before-and-after galleries from real jobs, and a quote form that asks for the right photos and frame dimensions, to your live site in two taps.
Goes through your live site for the things that actually move upholstery rankings: suburb keywords on every product hub, AUA membership and the fabric houses you carry called out as trust signals (Warwick, Mokum, Zepel, Profile, Pelle Leather), separate keyword targeting per niche so the banquette page doesn't cannibalise the residential page, and a Google Business Profile that lists every niche service properly. Auto-applies the low-risk fixes.
Launches separate Google Ads campaigns per niche: residential-restoration ads in the suburbs that have the heirloom-furniture market (Paddington, Mosman, Toorak, Hawthorn), commercial-banquette ads aimed at cafe and hospitality owners, auto and marine ads aimed at the classic-car restoration enthusiast. Drops the broad 'upholsterer' bid that puts you against the lowest-price competitor. Switches Meta on selectively for the visually-rich residential restoration before-and-afters where it actually converts.
Turns every finished job into a post in your real accounts: a before-and-after pair of a recovered armchair, a banquette strip showing the old foam, an Italian-leather classic-car interior, a hand-tied spring detail. Builds the trust signal that wins the customer who is about to put grandmother's chair on the kerb. You upload one photo per finished piece, the agent drafts the caption in your voice, you approve.
Drafts the long-form pieces customers Google before they decide between recover and replace: 'recover or replace: when is reupholstery worth it', 'how much does it cost to reupholster a chair in Sydney', 'a fabric weight guide for residential reupholstery'. Two drafts a month, in your voice, that catch the customer at the moment they're about to throw the chair out.
Your first 30 days.
- Site imported, hosting bill killed
- Annual plan around your two priority niches delivered by Sam
- Google Business Profile flipped to 'Upholsterer' with all four niches listed
- Three re-upholster suburb pages indexed and ranking on the long tail
- Commercial-banquette Google Ads live with half-the-cost-of-replace anchor
- First fortnight of before-and-after captions queued in your voice
- Recover-or-replace decision-guide drafted for the residential hub
- Cafe-banquette outreach sent to three local hospitality venues
An upholsterer who hand-ties eight-way springs, rebuilds horsehair fills, and turns a 1960s wing chair into the piece the customer's grandchildren will inherit is already better than anyone the customer can find on Hipages. The work is making sure the customer about to drag that chair to the kerb finds your name first, sees the before-and-after gallery, and rings the workshop instead. That's the suburb-page library, the niche-by-niche ad set, the social grid that posts every restoration, and the cafe and aged-care relationships that smooth the commercial-volume work.
Agencies are too dear to run four separate niche campaigns plus hospitality outreach for $3.5k a month. Tools are cheap but the before-and-afters stay on your phone and the cafe outreach never gets sent. In-House is the third option: for $299 a month the agents ship the re-upholster pages, launch the banquette ads, post the restoration before-and-afters, and brief the cafes and aged-care facilities you want on repeat work. You stay in the driver's seat, two taps to approve, minutes a day. Stop losing the heirloom chair to the kerb.