Whether it’s for a hotel, restaurant, office or retail store, custom-made upholstery for a space can elevate the mundane and provide ‘people’ with an experience. The furniture you choose to purchase for your business can impact the heartbeats of your customers. Whether it’s waiting for an event or meal, conducting business or shopping, custom-made upholstery in an environment can help develop the emotion and ambience a business wants to portray all while benefitting from feeling good.
The Importance of Atmosphere in Commercial Spaces
Everything starts with first impressions. In today’s world, how your space is presented to a client, customer or business partner the first time they walk in your door is of primary importance to how their experience of your business will begin. The space you design, the colours you choose, the furniture arrangement, the lighting and other components define the atmosphere they are entering – setting the tone and influencing the impression you want to make about yourself: professional? Warm? Creative? Luxurious? Every business interior relies on custom upholstery to make you look the way you want to be seen because it cultivates the experience you want your patrons to have.
Imagine a lobby – each seat custom-made, a colour that works with the scheme of the room, a fabric that can survive the daily assault of traffic, and still be comfortable, and that’s been customised for the space, whether a sofa, a chair or a bench, all of it, as they say, bespoke, a word that denotes something distinct from the knick-knack, or matching frayed shagreen velvet lampshades, and chocolate-coloured cotton napkins from a one-page catalogue. This is detail that standard designs can’t provide.
Customization Tailored to Your Business Needs
Because this custom upholstery job is entirely in your hands, you can sculpt the atmosphere and the activity into a form that aligns more intimately with your values and ultimate objectives. An active, playful and stimulating retail experience may call for bright colours and bold pattern, whereas a rather understated law office may rely on a calm, grey-toned palette, and lemon corduroy, to allow for low-key, quiet contemplation. How does your business mission translate into guests’ visual experience? Functional, impactful furniture that looks great can be crafted via custom upholstery.
Moreover, the freedom to choose every detail – from the fabric to the fringes – means that every piece can be tailored to the particular needs of your parlour, conference room or boardroom. High-traffic areas might call for robust fibres that are both hardwearing and hygienic, while executive conference rooms demand luxurious textures to impress those coveys of rampant high rollers. The opportunities for clients to treat themselves are limitless with the flexibility of custom upholstery.
Enhancing Comfort and Functionality
This is why comfort is the key when you design or redesign your commercial spaces – especially those places where people have to wait around or stay for a long time – and thanks to made-to-measure upholstery you can not only improve the look but also the comfort of your furniture, which means better customer experience, greater satisfaction and even more productivity for your employees.
It might be a public space, such as a hotel lobby, in which case it offers somewhere for people to sit and loiter; in this case, most of the seats in the lobby will be taken when your guests arrive, but a well-made, traditionally upholstered armchair still is head and shoulders above a randomly-chosen sofa. Or it might be an office environment, in which case they offer postural support, as a substantial percentage of leather office chairs do by offsetting leather with supportive fabric upholstery. it’s easier to impress people if they’re comfortable.
A Showcase of Quality and Durability
Another big pro of custom upholstery is that you’ll eventually receive a quality, long-lasting piece of furniture. Off-the-rack pieces tend to use standard materials that won’t last long under the rigours of a day spent at the office. Custom upholstery allows you to select materials that best work for you, and piece together a beloved furniture that is definitely crafted to withstand constant use, and look fabulous and on point for years to come.
Durability is important here, too. Chairs and booths go in and out of use multiple times in a day, spills happen, items get cleaned regularly. The right fabric can make the difference in ensuring a space that delivers the experience you want to offer, and custom solutions can allow for the type of materials that look as good as they feel – yet are resistant to the staining, fading and abrasion that can help any furniture endure the test of time. Custom, well-made upholstery solutions will also not require frequent updates in order to keep your business looking good and saving money, in the years to come.
Aligning Upholstery with Brand Identity
It’s part of your brand, and every piece should meet your branding objectives. The fabrics you choose for your custom upholstery are part of your brand vision. Something sleek and modern? Classic elegance? Quirky creativity? These upholstery choices will be part and parcel of creating that image.
Perhaps a tech start-up wants to appear edgy and futuristic, so it can use sleek, minimalist forms in vibrant, primary colours. On the flipside, a spa that wishes to calm and relax its patrons will likely appeal to the senses with muted, soothing hues and plenty of plush, furry textures. When every piece of upholstery can be swapped out to work with any brand’s colour palette, logo and look, anyone who enters will have a consequently more harmonious experience.
The Role of Custom Upholstery in Customer Experience
Indeed, it is the pleasure of the experience which will be the competitive element in a marketplace. If your client feels good and welcome, she or he will return and tell her or his community about you. Custom upholstery can be an element in your room to heighten that pleasure, to distinguish your place as a unique memory.
Say a boutique clothing store that has specially designed upholstered chairs and even sofas for people to sit on while trying on shoes, or while waiting to be served or waiting for a friend, or the doctor’s office that has purposefully chosen attractive chairs for people to sit on while waiting to be called into the examination room. The style and comfort of the furniture will result in an overall more pleasant stay for the customers, and so an extension of the average time spent in the store.
Maximizing Space Utilization
Custom upholstery also allows restaurateurs the most practical usage of square footage for their business by creating furniture that is optimised for whatever space is available, instead of a catch-all standard furniture.
For the restaurant, that’s custom booths that mysteriously fit at a precise angle because they were built to follow the floorplan closely enough that they can fit flush against a corner, tightly surrounding it so that it can hold the maximum number of tables for a given footprint while still ensuring that people can pass by restrooms and storerooms without getting stuck. In an office, custom upholstery could be fitted so closely to the floor plan that it will fill every square inch without impeding egress or crowding the space. Custom efficiency means filling every free foot of space that you have.
Sustainability and Eco-Friendly Options
It’s become essential for every business to be more and more ‘green’. Nowadays, a large corporation can’t simply ignore its effect on the planet anymore and get away with it. Lots of customers prefer businesses that prove they’re eco-friendly. By choosing custom upholstery, you can prevent the use of any other materials but the ones harvested sustainably, as well use only the methods of manufacture that aren’t harmful to the environment.
A Long-Term Investment in Quality
Custom upholstery is not only costlier upfront – although far less so than many pieces of commercial furniture – but is often less expensive in the long run than comparable custom pieces, since items are designed with durability, quality and a custom fit in mind, and therefore last longer, require fewer repairs and maintenance, and keep your commercial space looking its best. These long-term savings translate into a better return on investment.
Furthermore, custom-upholstered pieces often can be re-upholstered as your design aesthetic changes (rather than simply getting a slipcover), so you can realistically refresh most pieces over time. As design trends change with regularity, the added flexibility of the custom-upholstered option enables you to keep it feeling fresh and in line with current trends that can extend the useful life of your business product over time.
Conclusion
Really, at the end of the day, custom upholstery in your commercial space is all about making your location more inviting and memorable for your customers, giving you a custom upholstery solution that could give you that leg up you’re looking for, allowing you to make your space unique by improving your customers’ experience and staying true to your brand and your vision.
It can also help to set your space apart from others by showcasing the investment you’ve made in well-made, original pieces – all the while earning goodwill from your clients and customers. Custom upholstery can be a smart business tool for drawing onlookers’ eyes, hearts and minds to your side as you rise above your competitors.
