Leather material matching is the sourcing step inside a reupholstery job. Something is being recovered in new material — one bench in a row, a single panel, or the whole unit — and matching decides what that material is. A sample is cut from an unseen part of the piece, under a seat deck or behind a skirt, and read for substrate, grain pattern and embossing repeat, thickness, temper, finish type, backing and weave, and duty rating. The replacement hide, vinyl or fabric is then ordered against those readings, from the supplier the furniture came from wherever that supplier still makes it. Where the article is still in production the match is exact; more often it is the closest current material on those readings, and you approve a physical cutting before anything is bought. Colour is a separate step and comes last, because a hide that is the right shade but the wrong weight will still read as a repair from across the room.

Usually, and on commercial furniture it is the normal case rather than the exception. Booths and banquettes outlive the article they were made in. We identify the original from the sample, chase the tannery or mill for the same article, and where it has been withdrawn, find the nearest current article on grain, thickness, temper and duty rating. If nothing current is close enough, we change the plan instead of accepting a near miss: recovering a whole element — one full banquette bay, both arms, all six chairs — removes the adjacency that would have exposed the difference.

Vinyl is matched on gauge, backing and rating rather than on hide grade. We record the total thickness, whether the backing is a knit or a woven and which way it runs, the embossing pattern and its repeat, the topcoat and sheen family, and the abrasion rating the article was specified at. Commercial vinyl is rated in double rubs, and dropping below the original rating on a booth that seats hundreds of covers a week will fail again in the same place. Matching upholstery material on a booth is as much a duty decision as a visual one.

Yes, and we take it ourselves during the assessment so nothing visible is cut. A photograph cannot carry thickness, temper or backing, and screen colour is unreliable on every device. The sample comes from an unseen area — the underside of a seat deck, the back face of a banquette, the inside of a skirt — and it stays with the file for the life of the piece, so a second repair two years later starts from the same reading rather than from scratch.

That is the failure this step exists to prevent, and when a panel does show, the cause is almost never colour. It is a grain that repeats at a different pitch, a hide half a millimetre thicker that will not fold into the same corner, a softer temper that creases in a new place, or a matte finish beside a satin one catching the light differently. Those four are decided by which material is bought, before anyone opens a pigment. Colour is then matched to the piece as it is today, faded and worn, under the light the room actually has.

You are told immediately, and before anything is ordered. Not every article can be matched exactly — some are long gone and nothing current sits close enough on grain, weight, temper and finish. That is our news to deliver the day we know it, not something you find out when a panel is fitted. In practice the answer is a change of plan rather than a compromise: we widen what gets recovered so the new material has nothing to sit beside, recovering one full banquette bay, both arms or all six chairs at a table. You approve that change before any material is bought, and the sourcing, the chasing and the samples stay our work throughout.