Oh Arizona, how we love thee. 

First the facts then the love story. 

Our shop is currently based in Tempe, and always will be. We definitely service all of Maricopa county but if there’s a job outside of Maricopa County but less than an hour from the shop we’ll be there. From Surprise to Queen Creek, Cave Creek to Laveen and everywhere in between, that's our turf. 

After years of resisting we finally gave in to our friends at Oregano’s and started a quarterly trip to flag and Tucson but after 6 years the reality was once again realized that going too far out of our service area takes us away from our core customer zone, the one hour radius. 

Man do we love Arizona, so much so that most of the businesses owned by our holding company, Brodie Built, are chartered out of Arizona.

Arizona is what you might call a happy accident. A competitor of our founding branch of Washington State moved to Arizona and started sending all his Washington customers to us. Out of gratitude we offered him some sort of referral fee but he refused. We did have some long time customers doing business in Phoenix so we offered him some AZ referrals in return. For one reason or another he insisted that we open a business here and he come to work for us, and that’s what happened. The Brodie brand grew quickly but our workforce did not. Upholstery is such a bugger to teach and learn, more of an artform than a trade, not everyone can pick it up that easily. 

Arizona was serviced on a remote almost part time basis; with our new friend, a contractor, flying upholsterers down from Washington every other month. It was a constricting way to grow a satellite branch. In 2012 our founder passed away from his 16 year battle with ALS. Giving a year for dust to settle Justin decided to sell his first and only home and use the equity in his “fixer upper” to go all in on Arizona. Boy did it pay off! Already having a client base and tools to boot, he decided to use his time to build a system to handle high volume. 

While these days his time is mostly spent in Washington, his heart is in Arizona and he visits the branch on a biweekly basis. Luckily his wife fell in love with him and Arizona. Someday, the majority of their time will be spent here instead of Washington.

I’m having a hard time closing this out, take it from here Linda....

AKA Alicia, my wife I lovingly call Linda. Why Linda? Have you ever seen the “Listen Linda” YouTube video? Alicia was famous for always saying “Listen” before some overly long story she was probably telling you for the 3rd time. So I lovingly coined her nickname to be Linda. (you can watch “Listen Linda” here). Linda acts as our company Controller and handles most of our Marketing.

At Brodie Upholstery, you know you are a part of the team when you have a nickname. 

Speaking of the team…Brodie Upholstery has so many important team members. Our Arizona branch wouldn’t run without our manager, T Smith, AKA Tracey Smith. She has been with the company for 17 years...ok maybe not that long but Justin always says a large number. Let's just say that Tracey has been with our company so long, we stopped counting. She is an integral part of the Arizona branch. She is the glue that holds that ship together; handling everything from managing our customer relationships, to writing estimates. She makes sure all of the employees and contractors know what they are doing and even gets behind the sewing machine when needed.

Read more about our team here.