COM & COL Explained: Using Your Own Fabric or Leather

What COM and COL mean

COM is Customer’s Own Material; COL is Customer’s Own Leather. You supply the fabric or hide from your preferred mill, and we build the piece with it. It’s the standard way designers keep exact control of the textile spec — pattern, colorway, performance rating — while the workshop handles frames, foam, and upholstery.

How the process works

• Spec the material. Choose your fabric or leather; note the vendor, pattern, and width.
• We confirm yardage. On your shop drawings, we calculate the yardage (or hides) each piece needs — including pattern repeat and railroading — before you order a single roll.
• You route the goods. Ship the material to our Los Angeles factory at 16520 Avalon Blvd, Carson, CA 90746 — or have your vendor drop-ship it — referencing your project so we can match it to your order on arrival.
• We build. Cut, sewn, and upholstered in-house on frames we build ourselves, so the whole piece is under one roof.

Planning your COM yardage

Use rules of thumb to budget, and shop drawings to buy. As typical contract planning figures on 54-inch plain goods: an upholstered chair seat pad takes roughly half a yard, a fully upholstered side chair 1.1–2 yards, a club chair 4–6 and more on a high or privacy back, a three-seat sofa 10.5–14, an ottoman 2–3, an upholstered headboard 5–13 depending on style rather than bed size, and a banquette 1–3 yards per linear foot depending on back height and whether the outside back is upholstered. Contract seating is built differently from residential — most yardage charts on the open web are residential slipcover charts and run several times high on a commercial chair. The full piece-by-piece chart is in the COM yardage chart.

Three things move those numbers: pattern repeat (large repeats can add 20% or more for matching), railroading (running fabric sideways changes cut efficiency, especially on long banquette runs), and leather, which is bought by the hide and estimated in usable square feet rather than yards. These are planning estimates for typical constructions — we confirm the exact yardage or hide count for every piece on your shop drawings before you place the mill order, so you neither over-buy nor come up short mid-production.

Why it matters for commercial projects

COM/COL keeps the textile budget and the performance spec (cleanability, TB 117-2013 compliance, wear rating) in your hands, with no showroom markup on the fabric. It also makes the piece reupholster-ready down the line. We accept COM and COL on every piece we build.