Apprenticeship as an industrial upholsterer

Apprenticeship at Girsberger
in Endingen am Kaiserstuhl, Germany

During your apprenticeship you will follow technical drawings and design specifications to produce chairs and upholstered furniture. You'll be using a wide variety of materials: fabric and technical textiles, leather, foams in differing grades, and many other filling materials. The first task in upholstery is to prepare the seat base and make other preparations.

This entails: attaching webbing or springs to wooden frames, cutting foam to size and attaching with adhesive, cutting and sewing upholstery coverings. Next the upholstery covering is attached to the frame, the feet or castors are fitted, and a function and quality check carried out. As Girsberger also produces very high-quality custom-made upholstered furniture, our apprentices gain experience in developing solutions to complex upholstery issues and learn to use a wide variety of different upholstery aids such as sewn-in plastic shapers, hook-and-loop fasteners and click-in connectors.

Girsberger also restores tired furniture: we replace upholstery foam and cover materials and renovate wooden frames. This means that our apprentices learn the more traditional upholstery skills, so gaining comprehensive experience for their later careers.

Duration of apprenticeship: 3 years

Industrial upholstery is the right vocation for you if you:

are good with your hands, can work carefully and accurately, have a love of textiles and leather, and have good spatial awareness. You also need a flair for shapes and colours and a certain amount of technical understanding. The required entry qualification is a good general education school leaving certificate issued on completion of grade 10 (German "Mittlere Reife" or "Mittlerer Bildungsabschluss" from a Werkrealschule).

«For me, choosing a profession wasn't at all easy, but here I'm in my element. Working on challenging design solutions and custom-built pieces at Girsberger is the perfect way for me to further develop my creative and crafting skills. Some interesting opportunities are opening up.»

 

What you need to know about the apprenticeship

3 x four-week vocational training blocks per year at the Friedrich-Weinbrenner-Gewerbeschule in Freiburg. There will be a practical intermediate examination halfway through your apprenticeship and the final practical examination will take place in-house at Girsberger.