Traditional Reupholstery Business | Marketing Case Study

BJ Upholstery based in Darlington is a traditional business that restores and reupholsters antique soft furnishings.  Operated by a husband and wife team they have been in the reupholstery business for thirty years.

The Challenges

The established local customer base was reduced, and general demand for reupholstery, repairs and restoration of antiques was reduced too.  A wider, more modern, targeted audience was required to promote the reupholstery and restoration services.

What We Do

First, we looked at the company website and the supporting social media. We ran a ‘Marketing Evaluation’ report that highlighted the company’s exposure online. They had very little exposure and the marketing message was weak. The new prospective customers required were online, engaging and chatting but they did not know BJ Upholstery existed. BJ Upholstery was well known in Darlington and narrowly showed in search results as an ‘antique reupholster’,  the ‘Marketing Evaluation’ report clearly showed where BJU was not showing well online and where the prospective customers were engaging.  This gave us the information we needed to build a marketing action plan.

We updated the website and created an easy-to-publish and search-friendly platform to work with.  We did not totally rebuild the website for a few reasons; we wanted to keep the costs down, it looked OK and the style ref elected the business accurately, a nice traditional upholstery workshop in a market town, a bit old-fashioned but well-established. We didn’t want to disturb the website image,  a modern generic-looking website would not fit.  The website looks like an old traditional upholstery workshop that is producing beautiful bespoke work – perfect. 

Next was to build the social profile; we added Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest and started telling the BJ Upholstery story consistently.  Photos and descriptions of completed work is published regularly which is really interesting to see by prospective customers.  Previously completed beautifully upholstered items were never seen by anyone else than the team and the furniture owner.  Website SEO was boosted by optimising the website pages and adding rich content to attract the target customers.
Forever evolving, ongoing and flexing content in response to demand and requirements as the business evolves and changes.  

The Results

Inbound enquiries are at a historical high and the company is attracting the ‘perfect customer’.  The perfect customers are people who appreciate quality and don’t mind paying for the best service.  People from further afield have become customers.  At the time of writing two sofas are in the workshop from Gloucester, BJ Upholstery are producing jobs for interior designers, making bespoke sofas to order, upholstered a chair in football shirts and last year reupholstered a footstool in a potato sack for a customer in London.

BJ Upholstery travel to the Yorkshire Dales, York, Harrogate, Newcastle as well as the surrounding area of Darlington and Durham.  Furniture can be shipped to the Darlington workshop and collected at completion. 

Digital Marketing can be overused and misunderstood.  Digital Marketing is simply your story and what you offer shared and reflected in the public domain, on the Internet, which is a digital environment. 

More Information

Learn More about our ‘Marketing Evaluation’ from Zedcomms.com.  See BJ Upholstery’s website

Zedcomms are a leading business development consultancy specialising in Website Design and Internet Marketing along with onsite training and ongoing mentor support.