Moving into campervan work

Business Hub · Working With the Trade

How it started

Two Christmases ago I was sitting about thinking of ways to push the business on. Nothing scientific — just the usual end-of-year stocktake of where the work comes from and whether enough of it is coming.

Scrolling a local Facebook group, I came across a campervan conversion company in my own town. I sent the owner a message.

He replied in two minutes: yes, we need help with upholstery.

They had been travelling a long way to get their cushions made, because there was nobody nearby doing it. I went in, we had a chat, and it was immediately obvious the two businesses fitted — his conversion work is excellent, and good trimming finishes it properly.

One message. Two minutes. After a year of unanswered emails to care homes and hotels, that is worth sitting with. The difference was not the pitch. It was that this time I had found somebody with a problem and no solution.

Why converters are such good clients

Campervan conversion has become a real industry, and it is full of small firms who are genuinely skilled at joinery, electrics, gas and plumbing — and have no upholstery capability whatsoever.

That matters for four reasons.

They cannot do it themselves and they know it. There is no awkward conversation about whether they could manage. They need someone.

It repeats. A converter building twenty vans a year needs twenty sets of cushions. Win the relationship once and the work keeps arriving without being sold again.

You are not squeezed on price. The customer has already committed tens of thousands to the conversion. The upholstery is not where anybody is trying to economise.

They are easy to find and easy to approach. Small local businesses with a workshop and a phone number, not a procurement department. Search your area, look in local groups, and message them directly.

If there is one piece of practical advice in this whole Business Hub, it is this: go and talk to every van converter within an hour's drive.

What the work actually is

Bespoke cushions, mostly.

Bench seat bases and backs, bed cushions, side and corner sections — all made to the shape of that particular conversion. Then, very often, the cab seats recovered to match, which is what turns a good job into a complete one.

The season runs hard from March to June. People want the van finished for summer, so the converters are flat out in spring and so are you. Plan for that, because it collides with nothing else in the upholstery year — domestic work is steady then, so you need the capacity ready rather than discovered.

Templates, and why they matter more than measurements

A chair has a frame. You work to it, and it tells you where everything goes.

A van has a shell. Every conversion is different, the panels are bespoke joinery, and almost nothing is square. Wheel arches intrude, walls lean, and a seat base that is 20 mm out will not drop in.

So the work starts with a template. I either make it on site or measure up myself.

What surprised me is how many customers arrive with their own. Plenty bring templates, which is ideal. Plenty more bring measurements — and that is where the trouble is.

If a customer sends measurements, ask them to check them against a template. Cardboard, hardboard, whatever they have. A template cannot be wrong about a shape. A list of numbers very easily can.

That one request has saved more remakes than anything else I do. It costs the customer half an hour and it removes the argument about whose fault it is when a cushion does not fit.

What is different from furniture work

The techniques transfer. The materials do not, and this is where furniture upholsterers get caught out.

Foam has two jobs. A campervan cushion is a seat by day and a bed by night, and those want different things. Too soft and it bottoms out when someone sits on the edge; too firm and nobody sleeps. It is usually a denser, deeper spec than a domestic seat, and layering — a firm supportive base with a softer top — solves it better than one medium block ever will. The foam and cushion specifier will get you to a sensible starting point.

Automotive cloth behaves differently. Much of it is laminated to a thin foam scrim, which gives it stretch and lets it pull over a curve without puckering. Furnishing fabric does not do that. It also has to survive far more sunlight than a sofa ever sees, through glass, all summer.

Adhesive is the one that catches people. A van interior in July gets far hotter than any living room. Standard furniture spray adhesive can let go in that heat, and you find out about it in August. Use a high-temperature contact adhesive intended for vehicle work.

Everything is a compound curve. Panels, headlining and cab seats have shapes that no piece of domestic furniture has. That is a skill in its own right, and it is the part that takes longest to pick up.

A walking foot machine is not optional. Foam-backed cloth, heavy vinyl and multiple layers will defeat a domestic machine.

Pricing it

I price this work by the metre — £40 a metre for the labour, with materials charged on top — rather than by the hour.

That sounds odd for bespoke work, but it suits this market well. The converter wants a number quickly, the jobs are similar enough that the metreage predicts the labour reliably, and it is easy to quote from a drawing or a template without a site visit. Work the metreage out with the fabric calculator and multiply.

A good day clears around £450. A full set of cushions with the cab seats done to match runs to about two days and a thousand pounds in labour.

Two things to be careful of if you adopt a per-metre model. It only works while the jobs stay similar — the moment something unusual comes in, price it properly by the hour instead. And check the figure against your real bench hours every few months, because a rate set once and never reviewed quietly becomes a discount. See how much should an upholsterer charge.

The cab seats are the upsell

A lot of customers want the driver and passenger seats recovered to match the conversion, and this is worth raising every time even when they have not asked.

It is the difference between a van with nice cushions and a van that looks finished. It is a natural yes at the point they are already spending, and it is what takes a job from a day to two days and from £450 to £1,000.

Ask. Most of them say yes.

Fire and compliance

Worth being careful here rather than assuming, because campervans sit awkwardly between two sets of rules.

The original driver and passenger seats are part of the vehicle and fall under automotive requirements. The furniture built into a conversion — bench seats, cushions, bed sections — is much closer to caravan furniture, which is within the Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988 as amended.

If you are supplying the materials, buy compliant and keep the certificates. If the converter supplies them, get the fire evidence at the same time as the cloth. The fire regulations checker covers the domestic and contract regimes, and if a specific job looks unclear, ask the converter what their own build standard requires and put the answer on the job sheet.

Would I do it again

It is now one of the better parts of the business, and it came from one message on a Saturday afternoon.

The work is enjoyable, the clients are competent people who know what good work looks like, the money is decent, and it repeats without being resold. It also uses skills most furniture upholsterers do not have, which keeps the competition thin.

If you are wondering where to grow, this is where I would look. Not because campervans are fashionable, but because there is a whole industry out there doing skilled work with a hole in the middle of it where the trimming should be.