An inside job: Area shop finds success restoring vintage car interiors

If you've been to a local car show, you've probably seen the work of Brian Thompson and his business, Premier Auto Upholstery. Premier was responsible, for example, for the interior of the 1951 Mercury that won best interior at last April's GSTA Rod & Custom Spectacular. But that's where the story is today. Here's how Thompson and his company got there.

Thompson worked on a local assembly line after high school. He was into cars (he still works on his 1966 Chevy Caprice and 2003 Corvette) and was interested in doing something more, shall we say, interesting, but he didn't want to be a mechanic because he "wanted something that wasn't so dirty." So he attended what's now Minneapolis Community and Technical College, completing a course in upholstery in 1981. He could now do something where, he admits, "you don't get quite as grubby as mechanics do."

After working for a now defunct auto upholstery shop while starting Premier in his garage, Thompson took his business full time in 1989. The Rogers shop now employs six and specializes in restoring and creating interiors for classics, muscle cars and street rods.

Premier handles between 10 and 30 cars a week, depending upon what needs to be done. Thompson says about 30 percent of his business involves interior repairs in modern vehicles, including warranty work for new-car dealerships. Premier also repairs boat seats, installs seat heaters and fixes convertible tops.

But Thompson says the bulk of Premier's work is on older cars. That type of business came his way more and more after the word spread about cars he worked on that entered shows. "We got a reputation," Thompson explains, "and we liked working on older cars because there's a little more artistic freedom. You get to create something." And create is what he and his team continue to do. "The guys take pride in what they do," he says of his all-male crew. "They're real craftsmen."

Premier upholsters seats with cloth, vinyl, leather, and real and simulated exotic materials such as ostrich and alligator. It even works occasionally with old materials that are still on their original rolls. But Premier also does much more. Before covering seats, for example, Premier often repairs them. Sometimes it almost builds them from scratch. And the shop also spruces up floors, door panels, dashes, headliners and trunks. The work involves a lot of hand-patterning because "things must fit properly," Thompson says.

While he spends most of his time now with customers and managing his business, Thompson still enjoys Premier's design process, describing it as "a team effort." Premier has handled some unusual projects, including working with real stingray skin, creating a "torn-sheet metal" look on seat covers to match a car's exterior graphics, and building a rear-seat champagne cooler. Premier also helped redo Thompson's Caprice after mice got into his restoration. The new custom interior included big speakers in the trunk. "The guys insisted," Thompson says, "though it's more than I need to listen to 'CCO."

Besides his success, what does Thompson enjoy most about his business? "I like seeing vehicles come in with little or nothing and leave with great interiors."

For more on Premier, visit www.premieruph.com.