Putting away the tools of his trade for good | Business | ahwatukee.com
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Alan Cranson stands in the 4,400-square-foot workshop of Cranson Custom Upholstery on Priest Drive near Broadway Road in Tempe. He and his brother, Paul, built the business from their father’s garage 51 years ago into the Valley’s premier upholstery repair provider. At the end of the month, he’ll be closing its doors forever.
(Spenser Lee/Staff Photographer)
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Alan Cranson stands in the 4,400-square-foot workshop of Cranson Custom Upholstery on Priest Drive near Broadway Road in Tempe. He and his brother, Paul, built the business from their father’s garage 51 years ago into the Valley’s premier upholstery repair provider. At the end of the month, he’ll be closing its doors forever.
(Spenser Lee/Staff Photographer)
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The books of fabric samples that once lined the pegboard-covered walls are disappearing.<br>Cardboard boxes are slowly filling with staple guns, tack hammers and the hand tools that have rarely been idle over 51 years.<br>Only a handful of pieces remain to be finished before the lights go out for good at Cranson Custom Upholstery in an industrial Park off Priest Drive near Broadway Road in Tempe.
Come Aug. 31, Alan Cranson will be turning the lock on the 4,400-square-foot workroom for the last time – closing a piece of Tempe history and a Valley titan’s presence in an industry that’s taken its share of hits from DIY furniture and cheap foreign imports.<br>For 51 years, Cranson Custom Upholstery has been a place where worn-out pieces of often treasured furniture were resurrected.<br>"It's time," Cranson said matter-of-factly about closing the room where thousands of chairs and sofas over decades gained new life.<br>And with it, Alan will be ending a career that began when the Tempe High School graduate decided he could learn enough in one single-semester upholstery class to make a living.<br>It also turned out to be enough to leave a mark on Tempe and the Valley.<br>If you've eaten at Serrano's Mexican Restaurants, you've sat in one of Cranson's booths. If you've visited the Tempe History Museum, you've seen one of his custom pieces, a replica of Sun Devil Stadium.<br>And you may well have visited one of the thousands of homes across Metro Phoenix that still hold sofas, chairs and heirlooms restored by hands most people never knew belonged to Alan Cranson, his brother Paul and, more recently, his son and grandson.<br>He never sought recognition for any of it.<br>"I've never really liked being in the spotlight," he said.<br>Instead, he let the work speak.
An enterprise born in a garage<br>In 1975, Alan and his younger brother, Paul, weren't seasoned craftsmen, just young guys looking to make a living.<br>Growing up on Farmer Avenue and attending Tempe Elementary schools before Tempe High, they often rode their bikes around a very different Tempe.<br>“Tempe was small in the early 1960s,” Alan recalled. “Downtown Tempe was like Mayberry. And most of this industrial park was still open fields, way back then,” he said of the place he’ll be leaving soon.<br>Alan got his start of sorts at a little shop on Broadway at Farmer called Tempe Sales that closed five years ago.<br>“They were in the upholstery and drapery supply business, and we lived basically 200 yards from the store,” he explained. “I was the young teenage kid who did the gopher work, stocking shelves and sweeping floors. Over the years, I got to be part of the staff, doing some deliveries and pickups.<br>“And I got to know about upholstery and draperies. Paul was right behind me,” he said of his brother, five years his junior.<br>There was no craftsman who took Alan under his wing and taught him the upholstery arts.<br>“We pretty well were self-taught," Alan said.<br>Working out of their father's garage, the brothers slowly built a business one chair at a time.<br>Their first shop in 1975 occupied just 1,000 square feet at First Street near 48th – in an area that is now State Route 143 and that was located on a paved river bottom.<br>One day five years after they had set up shop, a flood overtook the area, turning their business into an island that Alan and Paul reached by an aluminum motorboat “to go and check the shop to see if it was still high and dry.”<br>It was.<br>But the brothers decided to relocate to their present location.
Seeing what others didn’t<br>The brothers shared all the duties, eventually bringing in Alan’s son Joel as well.<br>“Paul does a lot of the custom work and cutting and sewing...