Sofa Manufacturing: From Upholders to ABB Robots

Most of a sofa is still made by hand. A frame is built, springs and foam go on, and an upholsterer pulls fabric tight and staples it down, piece by piece. Sofa manufacturing has fewer robots than most furniture work. Fabric and foam give way under a gripper, and in custom plants the next sofa on the line may have a different cover. This post looks at how sofas were made by London upholders and American factories, what is changing in North Carolina and Mississippi this year, and where ABB robots could take on the heavy, repetitive parts of the job.

Ligne Roset's Togo seating, designed by Michel Ducaroy in 1973 and made from foam without a hard frame. Photo: Ligne Roset Deutschland / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How upholders and furniture towns built the sofa

The word sofa reached English from Turkish, which took it from the Arabic suffah, a ledge or bench. Sofa and settee both came into use at the start of the 18th century, and Nathan Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum of 1730 still described a sofa as a kind of alcove furnished with carpets and cushions. In 18th century London the people who padded and covered seats were called upholders. They belonged to the Worshipful Company of Upholders, and the big furniture firms paired a cabinet maker with an upholder, as in Vile and Cobb or Ince and Mayhew.

An upholstered settee made between 1740 and 1760, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Traditional upholstery is built up in layers by hand. Upholsterers stretched webbing across the frame, stitched in coil springs (used after about 1850), then packed animal hair, coir or straw over them and covered the lot with hessian, linen scrim, wadding and the top fabric. Each layer had to be shaped and tied before the next went on. Modern upholsterers use serpentine springs and synthetic materials such as dacron and vinyl instead, and foam took the place of much of the old stuffing.

An upholsterer sews on a Singer machine in the Otahuhu workshops, New Zealand, 1953. Photo: J.F. Le Cren / Archives New Zealand via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Factories grew up around that work. Grand Rapids in Michigan and Hickory in North Carolina became furniture towns, and Long Eaton in Nottinghamshire is still known for upholsterers. In 1927 the cousins Edward Knabusch and Edwin Shoemaker started out in Monroe, Michigan, with a reclining chair they first mocked up from orange crates, and the company became La-Z-Boy, which added reclining sofas in 1969. In 1973 Michel Ducaroy designed the Togo for Ligne Roset, a seat made from five densities of foam with no hard frame at all.

Springing up a sofa at the Tomlinson Chair Manufacturing Co. in High Point, North Carolina, in the 1930s. Photo: Lewis Hine / NARA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Sofa manufacturing today, and where robots fit

The American industry shrank in the early 2000s as imports grew, but custom upholstery has kept much of it onshore. GrepBeat reported in July that Kathedra, a startup in Conover, North Carolina, founded in 2024 by David Faes, is building machines that staple down panels and fasten steel bands, the tasks that wear upholsterers out. It cites an estimate that one in three upholsterers has chronic musculoskeletal problems such as carpal tunnel and back pain. Kathedra's stapling machine is in a $235,000 prepaid pilot with Vanguard Furniture.

A worker tries the springs along the edge of a sofa at the Tomlinson factory in High Point. Photo: Lewis Hine / NARA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

New capacity is still being added by hand-skilled plants. On 27 September 2026 Area Development reported that A&W Custom Furniture, which makes sofas and sectionals in Okolona, Mississippi, will spend $2.2 million to buy its existing buildings, add new equipment and a fourth production line, creating 20 jobs, with help from the Mississippi Development Authority. Plant Services covered the same expansion on 8 October. Many of the jobs on such lines are the ones robots handle poorly today: fitting a cover around arms and cushions and checking that every seam lines up.

Newly upholstered sofas and armchairs in an upholstery shop in Nigeria, 2026. Photo: Confidence24 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

We found no ABB robot working on a sofa line, so what follows describes possibilities. ABB's wood industry material describes robots handling panels and large parts, and the same arms could take frames and cushions between stations. An IRB 6700 has the reach and payload to lift a finished sofa frame, while a smaller IRB 1300 could hold a staple gun along a fixed path on a frame in a jig. A GoFa CRB 15000 could work beside an upholsterer and do the long rows of staples. Our post on car seat manufacturing covers similar soft goods work, where seat makers face the same problem with foam and covers.

An ABB IRB 6700 lifts a large panel at dhp technology. Photo: ABB

What comes next for the sofa factory

The first robots to arrive will most likely do the jobs Kathedra picked: stapling, banding and lifting, where the path is known and the work hurts people. Fabric can already be cut on computer controlled cutting tables, so the harder gap is handling and fastening. A robot that stretches fabric over foam needs to feel how hard it pulls, which is why force sensing cobots are a better match than fenced arms for that step. Programs for these cells are usually planned first in RobotStudio, where the reach around a bulky frame can be checked.

Fabric cutting with a computer controlled cutter in the upholstery shop of a furniture factory in Güstrow, 1989. Photo: Wolfried Paetzold / Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

Buyers at home will notice less. Modular and flat packed sofas ship in boxes and are put together in the living room, which moves part of the assembly out of the factory altogether, as we described in our post on flat pack furniture. Custom sofas will probably keep a person at the centre of the work, with machines doing the lifting and stapling around them. Kathedra's founder says custom upholstery is a big reason the work has stayed in the United States, so the people who do it matter to the business.

ABB's GoFa cobot is guided by hand and stops when it senses contact. Photo: ABB

Cost is a real barrier, because many upholstery plants are small and change fabric, size and style from one order to the next, and a robot pays off best on repeated work. Staple guns, sharp steel bands and heavy frames are hard on people, but an arm carrying a staple gun next to a worker needs speed limits and monitored zones, which is where SafeMove comes in. Then there is the workforce: most furniture workers are close to retirement, few young people join, and the ones who stay will need to learn to run robots as well as sew.

An ABB IRB 1300 small industrial robot with an operator holding the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

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