Oh snap! The vinyl question! We’ll give you the long answer since we only have to type it once. It’s worth the read! The more you know…

NO! Not all vinyls are created equal. There are good vinyls and bad vinyls. The gooder (it’s our website so we are allowed to make up words😂) the better! The better material used, the less you will pay in labor cost maintaining your upholstery. In fact, Brodie itemizes the vinyl on every invoice just for that purpose. If an upholstery shop can use a lesser quality material, first, they don’t have to pay as much for it, and second, you will have to call them to come back and fix it sooner. Our goal is to be your upholstery shop for a lifetime, so we only use the best materials that will last the longest. Or, alternatively, we match the OEM (original equipment manufacturer) material so things match and look brand spanking new at all times 😍

Back in the day, vinyl was judged by the weight of the vinyl. Vinyl is sold by the yard and weighed by the ounce. The idea was that the heavier the yard of vinyl, the more material must be in the product, and the more material the better. This is only somewhat true today. These days vinyl manufacturers have developed a top coating that protects it and makes it last longer. Naugahyde calls it their “Beauty Guard” and Boltaflex calls theirs “PreFixx”. Naugahyde is one of the first (and best) vinyl manufacturers there is. It was invented in 1914. That's over one hundred years old! Naugahyde has many lines but their top seller is called Spirit Millennium. Which is better known as just Spirit in the industry. Boltafex is a little newer to the vinyl game, making its debut over 50 years ago. Their top selling line is called ColorGuard and it’s proven to be the strongest vinyl time and time again. 

The New Fangled Test:

The “abrasion test” also known as “the double rub test” has been the new fancy way to tell if a material is strong or not. This test involves a cotton ball rubbed on a piece of vinyl over and over again. As soon as the vinyl shows wear, the test is stopped. The cotton ball is attached to a clicker or a counter type mechanism. Once the vinyl shows wear, the test is stopped, the count is recorded, and marketed on the back of a sample card. The funny thing about the abrasion test is that the number keeps getting bigger over the last couple decades but the vinyls still look and feel the same to us. It also seems to last just as long. For these reasons we feel the double rub test is more of a marketing skeem than a real measure of durability. 

The Brodie Test:

Since our largest revenue stream is upholstery on fitness equipment, and gym pads get beat up more than most, we decided to test these vinyls at the gym. How do we do that? Enter the Roman Chair machine aka the captains chair, the leg lift or whatever you want to call it (just do call it the hyperextension because that’s something totally different Mr. Trainer Guy). It’s an abdominal workout, you get up in this machine and put your forearms on these two pads, let your legs dangle down then lift your legs out in front of you. It’s what allows you to drink so much beer in the Summer. Basically you can not use only one arm pad on this machine, so what we do is, put the newest, latest, and greatest vinyl on the left arm pad of the Roman Chair, then we put Colorguard on the right arm (ColorGuard wins every time), then we put the date on the back of the pads, in our customers digital profile, and wait. When we come back months later, we see which vinyl lasted the longest, log the dates, then run the test again. Not all vinyl has the same texture, and due to this we run the test against the all-time champ first (color guard) then we run the testing of similar textures. For instance, we can tell you that even though Spirit is the OG of vinyl, Olympus, a spirit imitation, actually lasts longer. Patriot Plus is a knock-off of Spirit made by Spradling but doesn’t last as long as Spirit, which is why we don’t market it on our site. 

Long Story Short:

If you're working with us, you don’t have to worry about any of this. We will either match your booth package exactly, or if some other upholstery shop has already used many vinyl's in your gym we can switch you to ColorGuard or any vinyl of your choice. We can even get you back to OEM. We can typically get any vinyl on planet earth. We work with many suppliers and with enough time we can find anything. However, to save you time we have linked our favorites to our site. These materials link back to the manufacturer site so you can check all the specs yourself, is it fire retardant? Do you live in California and need some sort of state mandate adhered to? We wanted to link back to the OEM so you can stay as up to date as possible. We can even mail you some free samples so you can see these materials in hand. 

Not all computer and phone screens show the same dye lots so you really need to see these colors in real life. It’s important to note that all vinyls do two things as they age and oxidize. 1) They darken and 2) they get shiny. Due to these two factors, freshly upholstered items will need about 2-3 months to shine up and darken before they match your existing items exactly, but don’t fret, they will match, we promise. 

The short answer is if you need new foam, you’ll know. If you sit on a seat and you can feel the wood or a spring sticking in your rear, you need new foam.

The longer answer, as far as a restaurant goes, foam is not designed to be sat on directly. If you can see your foam please have your vinyl replaced before you cause more damage to your foam. Foam is a petroleum product so the price has a tendency to go up and down with the cost of oil. The best way to tell if you need foam is your customers complaining about how uncomfortable your seats are. We would also like to take the time to tell you that putting duct tape on your vinyl, if that tape sticks to the foam, it can rip the foam when we take the vinyl off your booth. Duct Tape should be avoided as much as possible. 

Gym Foam:

When Brodie upholstery started in the late 80’s all gym pads were flat foam cut from a sheet. We used to re-foam gym pads at least once per week, and it was rather easy. We carry sheets of foam on the truck  with a foam saw, and upholstery glue. These days equipment manufacturers have really dialed in their foam process. We probably only re-foam 1-2 pads per year. We should say we re-foam 1-2 pads that actually need it and another 20 that don’t need it but our customer insisted. Unlike most companies in this area, we still try to operate from “the customers are always right” standpoint. So if you want new foam and we tell you it doesn't need it, but you insist it be done, then we will do it and charge accordingly. But as we were saying, the equipment manufacturers have really dialed in their foam process and most of it will last the life of the equipment. 

One way they have changed is by pouring a customer molded foam that we can not replicate exactly with sheets of foam in the truck. Also, since they now pour the liquid foam on the pad in the factory it’s extremely difficult and time consuming to remove foam from fitness pads these days. It’s also difficult to get sheets of foam to bend and wrap around angles or rolls so anymore, so you’re better off buying a new pad than paying us hours to take it apart and try to rebuild it to match the factory. Just because the foam has a little indentation in it does not mean it needs to be replaced. Turn to your members here, if you members are complaining about foam, it’s time for us to have a talk. If they aren’t complaining, default to the “if it ain't broke, don’t fix it” mentality. Since we are a B to B company we are trying to help you improve your P&L by keeping your R&M (repair and maintenance) down. Replacing good foam is not going to sell you any more memberships; don’t pay us to fix it.

You probably have a broken spring, or two, or five. Inside most booths is what's called a “no-sag” spring. It’s called that because they are never supposed to “sag”. But, guess what? They do. You’ll see it if you pull the booth out of the unit. Some springs will either be broken clean in half or the fastening clip at the end  will be broken. Either way, we carry springs and clips on the truck so those can be fixed. 

We do want to take the time to point out that these should be fixed from the top side of the booths. This means the vinyl, foam, and spring cover material will most likely need to be removed in order to get to the spring and be repaired properly. We have tried fixing these from the bottom many times. 70% of the time you can make a repair from the bottom but 90% of the time a repair from the bottom won't last more than a month or won't be in-line with the rest of the springs creating a surface on the top of the booth that looks more like a ski slope instead of a nice straight seat cushion. Since quality of work is one of our three value propositions here at Brodie Commercial Upholstery, our technicians only repair no-sags from the top side of the booth ensuring a repair that lasts.

Absolutely not! Our whole operations are designed for us to come to you. So much so that if you come to our shop, it’s unlikely that we will be there. So please, for the love of God, don’t just show up😂

We heavily depend on cloud-based systems, syncing our customers data, real time, and paperless amongst our whole team.

Brodie Commercial Upholster is the largest fully MOBILE upholstery company in Washington and Oregon. It was built so that we come to you - disrupting your business as little as possible.

Billions (JK🤣)! We want to be very clear that price is not our value proposition. Our goal is to offer the best materials, quality of work, and service for a fair price. We’re not out to make millions on one job. We want to be your upholstery solution for life. So we charge a fair price, enough to make a living, pay the bills and keep our turnover low. You might be able to find a guy in a garage somewhere willing to give their time away but we have put thousands of hours into our pricing. We make sure that we stay extremely competitive and charge everyone the same whether you're a large corporation with many locations or a single location business. We charge everyone the same. 

In the furniture upholstery world, most pieces cost less to replace and to reupholster. Family heirlooms and antique furniture are worth upholstering but most furniture is less expensive to replace. In the commercial world this rarely happens but if it does, we’ll let you know. Our accounting file has over 7,000 service items in it. Each job has been job costed financially and researched over and over again to ensure we’re making a profit and you're paying a fair price for the product and service.

After 40 years in business, we are confident in our pricing and believe we offer the most fair and competitive price on the market.

We are glad you asked! My grandfather used to say “It’s hell to be organized”. I never really knew why he said that but I can tell you it’s true. We can also tell you it’s hell to drive back to the same jobsite over and over to answer questions only an upholster could answer. 

For that reason, Brodie Commercial Upholstery is a data collecting monster of an upholstery company. We do things over and over again, and anything done over and over should be systemized for optimum performance. One way we use technology is to cut down on drive time, burning less fuel, and using less materials. Due to the nature of mobile upholstery we travel a lot and charge for that travel. The more data we collect, the more prep work can be done in the shop, cutting down on travel and trip charges. We collect patterns of our customers' upholstered items, photo albums of job sites, log our customers start times, table numbers, maps, and even have a proprietary internal app our whole team manages together. Papa would be proud! My wife oftentimes tells people that we are a technology company that happens to do upholstery 😉

We are currently bets testing another propriety customer facing app to help make our processes for the customer even easier!

In Washington our main areas of service have been Pierce and King County since our shop has always been in the Tacoma area. We often go to Snohomish, Thurston, and Kitsap Counties but at some point the non-billable hours outweigh the upholstery hours and we have to call it quits if things fall below our breakeven. We do service some farther locations like Marysville and Centralia but that’s because we have some large customers with locations in those areas. We also do a route to Silverdale and Eastern Washington Tri-Cities and Wenatchee but those longer trips have to have multiple customers on board for service. 

In Arizona we have always serviced Maricopa County. There were a few years when we ran a quarterly route to Flagstaff and Tucson but we had to suspend those routes due to a labor shortage and being so busy in the valley. We may reignite those routes some day in the future but for now we try to stay within one hour of Tempe.

And, we always have our eye on expansion into other states. Stay tuned for what is to come…🤗

*If you need service outside of these locations, please reach at as we may be able to help for an additional charge.