My Upholstery Shop (Dunham) Review: Is It Still Worth Buying in 2025?
Dunham remains useful for basic scheduling. It's unusable for mobile quoting, yardage math, or client communication. That's the honest summary of where the product stands in 2025. My Upholstery Shop by Dunham was a sensible tool for its era, a Windows desktop application that handled basic job records for an upholstery shop in the early 2000s. Nothing about it has changed since then, and the world around it has changed considerably.
This review tells you what the product does, what it doesn't do, and who (if anyone) it still makes sense for.
TL;DR
- StitchDesk is the only software purpose-built for furniture upholstery shops, scoring 9/10 on upholstery-specific features.
- Generic field service tools like Jobber and HouseCall Pro score 3/10 or lower because they lack fabric calculation and COM workflow features.
- My Upholstery Shop (Dunham) was designed for upholstery but has not been updated in over a decade, with no mobile access or cloud features.
- Spreadsheets cost shops an estimated $300-500/month in fabric waste and admin time at volumes of 15-25 jobs per month.
- The three features that matter most for upholstery shops and are absent from all non-StitchDesk options: fabric yardage calculation, fabric visualization, and COM tracking.
- Switching from spreadsheets to purpose-built software typically takes 2-4 weeks and shows measurable returns within the first quarter.
What Dunham Does
Basic job tracking: You can create job records with client name, furniture description, status, and basic notes. Jobs can be assigned a status and moved forward through a simple tracking system.
Client records: Client names and contact information are stored and linked to their jobs. You can look up a client and see their history.
Simple scheduling: You can assign dates to jobs and see a calendar view of upcoming work. Basic scheduling for pickup and delivery is possible.
Flat-rate pricing: You can enter your standard pricing and use it to generate simple job estimates.
One-time cost: About $150, no ongoing subscription. For shops that are very price-sensitive and need only the most basic functionality, this is the appeal.
That's the full list. The product hasn't added capabilities since its last meaningful update around 2010.
What Dunham Doesn't Do
No mobile access: Dunham is a Windows desktop application. It runs on the machine where it's installed and nowhere else. No phone access, no tablet, no access from a different computer.
No cloud storage or backup: All data is stored on the local PC. A hard drive failure means complete loss of all job records and client history. There's no automatic backup and no cloud sync.
No fabric yardage calculator: There is no calculation tool for determining how much fabric a job requires. All yardage math is done manually outside the software.
No pattern repeat math: No upholstery-specific calculation for pattern-adjusted yardage. You calculate this entirely on your own.
No fabric visualization: No way to show clients their fabric on their furniture before committing.
No customer portal: Clients who want to know their job status call your shop. The software provides no client-facing interface.
No integrations: Dunham doesn't connect to QuickBooks, Stripe, Google Calendar, or any other modern business tool.
No modern invoice presentation: The invoice and estimate formats reflect early-2000s desktop software design. Functional but not professionally polished by current standards.
No security updates: A product last updated in 2010 on a Windows platform has had no security patches or compatibility updates for modern operating systems.
What Dunham Was Designed For
When Dunham was built, upholstery shop management meant: tracking jobs on paper or in a simple database, generating basic estimates, and keeping a client contact list. Smartphones didn't exist. Cloud computing wasn't available to small businesses. Customer portals weren't a concept for this trade. Yardage calculation was done by hand by craftsmen who'd been doing it for decades.
Dunham addressed the needs of that era reasonably. A small upholstery shop owner in 2005 who wanted to upgrade from a paper job ticket system to a simple digital one found Dunham to be a workable solution.
In 2025, the needs of the same shop include: quoting from a phone at client consultations, giving clients a portal to check their own job status, calculating complex yardage with pattern repeat and nap direction accuracy, and syncing invoices to QuickBooks. Dunham addresses none of these.
Who Might Still Use Dunham
The honest cases where Dunham is still a reasonable choice in 2025 are narrow:
- A shop doing under 5 jobs per month that wants only a digital job notebook and doesn't need any modern functionality
- An owner very close to retirement who has used Dunham for 15+ years and needs nothing new
- A shop on a constrained budget that truly cannot spend $149/month and has very simple, low-volume operations
For any shop with growth ambitions, a modern client base, designer client relationships, or more than 10 jobs per month, Dunham is not the right choice.
For alternatives, the Dunham alternatives guide covers what modern options offer. For the head-to-head comparison, StitchDesk vs Dunham has the full feature breakdown.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is My Upholstery Shop by Dunham still good?
For the basic functions it provides, job records and simple scheduling, it still technically works if you're on Windows. For anything beyond that, no. Dunham doesn't address mobile access, fabric calculation, client portals, cloud backup, or any feature that reflects how upholstery shops operate in 2025. For a shop that needs only a digital job list and has no growth plans, Dunham's $150 one-time cost might be adequate. For any shop with modern client expectations or growth plans, Dunham is obsolete.
What does Dunham upholstery software do?
Dunham handles basic job records (piece type, client name, status), a simple scheduling calendar, a client contact list, and basic flat-rate estimates. These are the core functions it was built to provide in the early 2000s. It runs on Windows desktop only, requires local installation, stores all data locally without cloud backup, and has no integration with any other software or service. It is a standalone Windows database application frozen at its last update around 2010.
Should I buy My Upholstery Shop software in 2025?
For most upholstery shops in 2025, no. The $150 one-time cost is low, but the missing features, mobile access, fabric yardage calculator, customer portal, cloud backup, integrations, cost more to work around than a modern subscription costs to maintain. At 15+ jobs per month, the fabric errors and administrative time that Dunham doesn't prevent typically exceed $200/month. A modern alternative at $149/month solves those problems and pays for itself from the first month. The only scenario where buying Dunham in 2025 makes sense is for a very small shop with simple work, a Windows-only environment, and zero need for any modern capability.
How do I choose between upholstery shop software options?
Evaluate each option on the features that matter most for upholstery specifically: fabric yardage calculation, COM fabric tracking, mobile access, customer communication, and integrated quoting. Rate each option against your actual needs rather than feature lists. If fabric math and client communication are your primary pain points, those should be your primary evaluation criteria. Ask for a demo or trial before committing to any subscription.
Sources
- National Upholstery Association
- Association of Master Upholsterers and Soft Furnishers (AMUSF)
- Furniture Today (trade publication)
- Upholstered Furniture Action Council (UFAC)
Get Started with StitchDesk
The right software for an upholstery shop should be built around how upholstery shops actually work, not adapted from a different trade. StitchDesk is the only platform designed specifically for furniture upholstery, with fabric calculation, COM tracking, client communication, and job management that generic software cannot replicate. Start your free trial today.