All Seasons Upholstery

Jon fritsch _{on Google}

Apr 5th, 2020

I like supporting small businesses, I really do, and I wanted to be able to give a good review here, but given the service I received, I just can't.
I'm with a student org at a local university, and we wanted to have some of our chairs reupholstered--they're very durable, so it was either that or get some sub-par ones that wouldn't last decades as they have.
Enter All Seasons Upholstery. They seem to be the only public business in the Keweenaw that I could find that reupholsters furniture. Looking at some of their past photos, the work the guy who runs it does is decent.
I dropped one chair off in mid-late August, and talked with him about what we wanted done--reupholstering them. I'm not an expert on anything, but in the end I think we ended up paying $675 for him to put canvas fabric on 5 chairs, the invoice stating $50 per chair in materials and $410 in total for all the labor. Now, again I'm not an expert, but the quality of the work is fine. I'm not really sure what to expect for the price paid given I've never had things reupholstered before, and I'm definitely adequately satisfied with the reupholstery work itself.
The reason I can't help but leave a 1 star review, however, is because of the communication, lack of transparency, and missed commitments. Now, I do follow several small businesses online, and understand that business can pick up and slow down at certain points of the year, and made it clear that I didn't mind if it took a little while longer than usual if some higher-priority things came up (we have a few chairs to spare, so having one or two out for a while isn't a big deal).
However, he never really contacted me back much, and I almost always had to reach out to him myself for any updates, deadlines, etc. His voicemail was pretty much full the entire time if I recall correctly, so texting or reaching him by chance was really the only way I was able to get ahold of him. He ended up having one chair (so he could get a template and such made) for multiple months, with minimal work being done as far as I saw (again, this wasn't a huge deal for me! But I do wish that I had been kept posted, instead of having to poke him for updates). It wasn't until near mid December that all the chairs were actually done, and I think we got the first chair back around Thanksgiving time, having sat at his business for over 2 months. If I recall correctly (it was this one or one of the other 4) it had a yellowish stain on it--what? We then setup a time for him to drop off the last of the chairs, which he missed with no communication. We did finally get the rest of the chairs back, but again it was after multiple missed appointments with no communication, no explanation, etc, and when he did bring them back, it was in the back of his truck, fully exposed to the elements and the legs themselves somewhat buried in the snow that had fallen in the back earlier.
I understand that life can get in the way if you're a small business owner, and I want to be understanding--it's not easy to start a small business and run it yourself--but when the owner doesn't tell you anything when they blow off an appointment to drop off your chairs or reach out with any updates or notice of delays, and seems very casual about the fact that you took time out of your day to wait for them to drop stuff off and they just blew off the scheduled time... that's not acceptable.
The final nail in the coffin was that the bolts holding the seat to the frame of one of the chairs had stripped, and he had basically just returned it to us as-is without getting new bolts, which would have cost only a few dollars at the hardware store and perhaps taken 30 minutes of his time. As a result the seat lifted up and wasn't anchored to the chair properly. This was only disclosed to us as he was dropping it off, we were again never given any heads-up, no "hey I found this issue with your chairs, but for $20 I'll fix it for good", no nothing.
tl;dr--decent work, but very poor communication, and missed appointments on multiple occasions with no explanations.