Upholstery Finder/How this site is built

How this site is built

Every fact on a shop's page comes from that shop's own website. Not from Google, not from Yelp or Houzz, and there's no star rating anywhere on this site. An average out of five tells you how somebody felt about a job, not whether the shop can re-tie the springs in a club chair or match the grain on a headliner.

There are two trades here and they are kept apart on purpose. A furniture workroom and an auto trim shop are asked different questions, because they do different work and publish different things about it. A shop that does both is listed in both, described from each side, and says so on each page.

Where a shop publishes testimonials, I read them. I never quote them, and no customer is ever named. A testimonial can contribute exactly one thing: a checkable specific the shop doesn't state itself, like a turnaround time, raised independently by more than one person. It gets written as what customers report, never as fact. Opinions about quality get thrown away however many people offer them.

Where a shop says nothing about something, its page says nothing. It never guesses.

What earns a page

Most of the shops I find never make it onto the site. A shop gets a page when its own website says enough about the work to be worth reading, what it takes on, what it does beyond recovering fabric. When a site says too little, I hold the shop back rather than publish a page padded out to look full.

Every shop listed here publishes a phone number or a working website of its own. Nothing is listed off the back of somebody else's profile page.

Some of what the search turns up isn't an upholstery shop at all, fabric shops, supply houses, trimmers who only do cars, carpet cleaners. Each one gets recorded as excluded with the reason written down, rather than quietly dropped, so I can revisit it and you can argue with it.

Where the words come from

The short description on each page is written from that shop's own website by a language model, working to the same rule as everything else here: it can't add a fact the shop doesn't state. Where a website says little, the description stays short instead of getting padded. Where it says almost nothing, the shop doesn't get published at all.

Keeping it current

Every published shop gets re-read regularly, and the date it was last checked sits on its page.