Caravan and holiday park work

Business Hub · Working With the Trade

What the work actually is

Most upholsterers picture caravan work as reupholstery. It is not. It is scheduled maintenance, and understanding that is the whole difference between finding it frustrating and finding it profitable.

A month's list from one park looks something like this:

• Broken zips on seat and back cushions, over and over
• Replacement cushions and interiors, specified to crib 5
• Rewebbing sofas and chairs where the elasticated webbing has gone
• Dining seat pads reupholstered
• Headboards recovered
• Split seams, pulled staples, torn corners

None of it is difficult. All of it needs doing properly and quickly.

The furniture itself is cheap. Genuinely, shockingly cheap by workshop standards — thin frames, light foam, budget cloth. That is not an accident and it is not the park being stingy. It is furniture built in the knowledge that it will be sat on by a different family every week, that children will jump on it, and that somebody will eventually put a suitcase on the arm. Building it to last twenty years would be money burned.

Take pride in the work anyway. A zip you fitted badly comes back next month, and you will be the one refitting it.

Why the parks want you

A holiday home out of service is not a maintenance problem. It is lost bookings.

That reframes everything. The park is not buying craftsmanship, it is buying availability. A sofa with a burst seam is a van that cannot be let at full rate, and every week it sits like that costs more than the repair. What they want is the thing working again by Friday.

They also want to keep what they already have for as long as possible. Replacing the soft furnishings across a park runs to a great deal of money. A maintenance contractor who can keep the existing furniture in service for another two or three seasons is saving them a capital spend, which is a far easier conversation than selling them new work.

Once you see it that way, the low unit value of each job stops mattering. You are not selling a cushion. You are selling uptime.

How the monthly visit works

We visit each park roughly once a month. The park collects jobs in between visits, and this is the part people find surprising: the vans stay in use the whole time. The site team holds things together with temporary fixes — a zip pinned or taped, a cushion turned over — and the family who books that week is generally none the wiser.

So the list is waiting when we arrive. We pull up outside a van, do what needs doing, and move on to the next one. Bish bash bosh, one after another, all day.

One day on one park can bring in over a thousand pounds.

That is the number that changes how you think about this work. Not because the individual jobs are well paid — they are not — but because the travel is amortised across thirty jobs instead of one, and there is no quoting, no fabric books, no customer deliberating over colours, and no collection and delivery. You turn up, you work, you invoice.

The margin in maintenance work is not in the price of each job. It is in the fact that nothing between the jobs costs you anything.

The van

The van is a mobile workshop, and getting the kit right is most of the battle.

• A walking foot machine that lives in the van — ours is a spare Jack, and having a second machine rather than lifting the workshop one in and out each time is worth every penny
• An air compressor and staple gun
• Hand tools, staples, tacks, adhesive
• Foam, wadding, webbing and common cloth in stock, so a job is done on the day rather than becoming a return visit

That last point matters more than any of the others. A job you cannot finish because you did not bring the right webbing is a job that costs you a second trip and earns you nothing extra. Stock the van for the work you know is coming.

The winter switch, and why it matters most

Parks shut down after New Year for a couple of months. An upholsterer whose only park work is caravan maintenance would call that a problem.

It is the opposite. It is when the good work happens.

While the park is closed, the restaurants, bars and entertainment venues can finally be stripped and refurbished — which is impossible while they are serving hundreds of people a day. We collect from all the sites we cover, bring it back to the workshop, and work through it. Some jobs are done on site where the seating is fixed.

That work pays properly. Around five thousand pounds in a week and a half is a realistic figure, and it lands in the deadest part of the upholstery year.

So the shape of it is:

• In season — fast on-site maintenance, monthly visits, keeping vans in service
• Shutdown — venue refurbishment and the renewal work that could not be done while the park was open

The part that makes this genuinely valuable

Read those two paragraphs again, because the seasonal pattern is the real argument for this work and almost nobody talks about it.

Domestic upholstery is feast and famine. It is busy in autumn, quiet after Christmas when everybody has spent their money, and unpredictable in between. January and February are the months that quietly break small workshops.

Holiday park work runs the other way. The maintenance carries you through the season, and the shutdown refurbishment lands exactly when domestic work disappears. The two fit together like a lap joint.

If you have read why being busy is not the same as making money, this is the structural version of that fix. It is not a better hourly rate. It is income that arrives when nothing else does, which is worth considerably more than the rate suggests.

Fire compliance — do not get this wrong

Upholstery in caravans and holiday homes falls under the Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988 as amended, the same as furniture in a house. That is the legal floor.

On top of that, park operators impose their own standard, and in practice that means crib 5 — BS 5852 ignition source 5, tested on the cover and filling together. They are letting accommodation with sleeping in it and their insurers and fire risk assessments drive the requirement.

Two practical consequences.

Buy compliant and keep the paperwork. Every foam, every cloth, every wadding, with certificates filed. An approved contractor gets asked for this, and "I think it was compliant" is not an answer.

Never let a park talk you into a shortcut. Same logic as the contract I turned down — you are the one with the trade knowledge, and being told to do it a certain way is not a defence.

The fire regulations checker covers both the domestic regime and the BS 7176 hazard categories if you need to work out where a specific job sits.

Getting approved

This is the barrier, and it is a real one. It took us a year to get in.

Large operators run approved contractor lists, and getting on one is a process rather than a phone call. Expect to be asked for:

• Public liability insurance of £5 million or more. This is the one that catches people out. Most small workshops carry £1m or £2m as standard trade cover, and that is not enough. Check your policy before you approach anybody, because you will need to increase it, and it costs more.
• Evidence that you understand the fire requirements, and that you buy compliant materials
• Method statements and risk assessments
• Some demonstration that you can actually cover the sites and the volume

The insurance is worth sorting out early even if approval is months away. Turning up to the conversation already carrying the right cover says more about whether you are serious than anything you could put in an email.

Persistence is most of it. The contact who cannot help you in March may well have a gap in their contractor list by October, and the workshop that stayed polite and kept in touch is the one they call.

Worth knowing before you start: this is a slow route in, so do not build a business plan around it landing quickly. Treat it as something you work at in the background while the domestic work pays the bills.

Is it for you?

Be honest with yourself about this, because it suits some workshops and not others.

It probably is not for you if you came into upholstery to do traditional work, you want every job to be something you are proud to photograph, or you dislike driving.

It probably is for you if you can work fast without dropping your standards, you are happy with repetitive work, you have or can get a van, and you want income that does not vanish in January.

We do both. The park work pays the overheads and smooths the year out, and it funds the traditional jobs that take three weeks and pay properly. Neither on its own would be as good a business as the two together.