Cindy Feinauer wants to talk about “fast furniture.” More than 9.5 million tons of furniture are thrown into U.S. landfills every year, according to the most recent data available from the EPA—equal to 80% of the new furnishings being manufactured.

Rather than avoiding this intractable waste problem, Feinauer took a giant leap toward addressing it. After many years of corporate sales jobs, she says she wanted to own a local business that fit her personal values, and at the end of 2024, she bought Kay Chesterfield, a 100-year-old reupholstery business in Oakland, CA. The company reupholsters about 2,000 pieces of furniture a year, which roughly translates to 60 fewer tons of trash in the landfill annually.

“If we can work within the local community to keep furniture in use, we can actually make a major sustainable impact,” says Feinauer.

But it’s a tough business to keep going, Feinauer says. When the cost of refurbishing a piece of furniture starts at $1800, most households would instead turn to online retailers like Amazon—where they could find, for example, a knockoff, mid-century modern armchair for as little as $100.

That may be why, before Feinauer took the helm, Kay Chesterfield started booking big institutional clients like Stanford University, UC San Francisco, and San Francisco International Airport. Airports and hospitals, of course, are dense with customized furniture. And tossing those heavily used lobby couches away every few years when they become shabby would be financially unwise. So for clients like these, Kay Chesterfield can more easily pitch the benefits of rehabbing the seat cushions instead.

 Running a modern-day upholstery business has other challenges, too. Cash ebbs and flows, of course, and labor costs are understandably high. Upholstering is not exactly a core class at trade schools, so experienced craftspeople are hard to come by. If Feinauer can’t pay her mostly self-trained workers enough, she’ll be hard-pressed to find replacements.

One of Kay Chesterfield’s senior upholsterers learned the trade 30 years ago from his uncle in Mexico. Another employee, Audrey Meyers, was taught by her mother, who was a hobbyist.

“ You just learn as you go in this industry,” says Meyers, who is also the company’s operations manager.

Kay Chesterfield, which employs nine people, is unusual. Most upholsterers in the U.S. are sole proprietors, or so-called “mom-and-pop shops,” says Keaven Willa Hartt, president of the National Upholstery Association (NUA).

“ We hear often that it’s a dying trade, which I always push back on,” says Willa Hartt, who also runs her own sole proprietorship, Willa Hartt Upholstery, out of her backyard shed in Portland, Maine. “ Most of us have waitlists that exceed a year, or even two.”

Upholsterers may not be so visible these days because they don’t always have storefronts, she says. But according to the NUA, a professional association that launched just before the 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns, there are as many as 8,000 upholstery businesses nationwide, most of which have fewer than 5 employees.

The pandemic was very good for the upholstery business, apparently.

“All of a sudden, [people were] staring at furniture that they really wanted to change,” says Willa Hartt.

Since Portland’s a popular vacation destination, Willa Hartt’s clients tend to be restaurateurs and people with second homes in the area. But upholstering isn’t just for people with surplus cash. Hartt says she has customers who will save up to preserve the life of a family heirloom.

Still, “sustainability” is the top reason that customers give for having their worn-out furniture remade, Hartt says. And for shops that can handle corporate orders, like Kay Chesterfield, state or local waste management laws can help support their trade. For example, since 2012, businesses in California that produce more than 4 tons of waste per week must have a commercial recycling plan. This forces larger organizations, in particular, to pause and consider the alternatives before they send truckloads of furniture to the dump.

Despite the rollercoaster ride, Cindy Feinauer says she hopes for more competitors in the upholstery business, so that more households will choose to repair that old sofa recliner, instead of scrolling Amazon listings to replace it.

“ If we can scale this industry, we can bring [custom upholstering] costs down,” she says.