Learning About Leather: Not All Leather is Alike

When considering adding to your leather collection, it’s important to know what you’re looking for. What type of leather is best suited to your needs? To assist in some of the research, we are showing you the pros and cons of the three main types of leather.

Aniline Leather
Aniline leather is considered the most natural looking leather. Some people refer to it as “naked leather” because of how natural it looks. It is known to be very soft and comfortable. A lot of people enjoy aniline leather because it preserves each marking it receives, making each piece completely unique. While this type of leather can be very visually pleasing, it is a material that is easily stained. If you have a busy family or high traffic in your home, this is a type of leather you may want to avoid.

Semi-Aniline Leather
The main difference between semi-aniline and aniline leather is the light protective coat semi-aniline receives. This protective coat is useful because it makes the material more resistant to strain and stains, which helps it to last longer. The color in semi-aniline leather is also more consistent than in aniline leather. The downside to this type of leather is the protective coat leads to less uniqueness; the leather does not retain markings as well with the protective coat.

Pigmented/Protected Leather
The most durable type of leather available, pigmented leather is covered with a polymer surface coating that contains pigments. This coating gives the leather more resistance to scratching, scuffing or fading. Pigmented leather does not have the unique qualities of other types of leather, as the sealant prevents marks from staying on the material. Pigmented leather is an excellent choice for busy families who have high traffic in their homes. Pigmented leather is easy to maintain and makes for an excellent couch or lounge chair material.

As you can see, there are good and bad aspects to every type of leather available. Being informed about which kind works best for your lifestyle is important when purchasing leather furniture. Happy shopping!

Source: Learning About Leather

Melbourne Franchise Business Opportunity!

Are you a budding entrepreneur looking for the chance to learn a new skill, truly be your own boss and take charge of your financial future? Fibrenew has an amazing mobile service franchise opportunity available right now in Melbourne & Area! With a lean & simple operation, flexible schedule and multiple revenue streams, Fibrenew might be the right fit for you!

What We Do

Fibrenew is a niche mobile service business that restores, re-dyes and renews damaged or worn leather, plastic and vinyl in homes, offices, boats, vehicles, airplanes, medical clinics and more. Anywhere there are items like this in need of restoration, we are called upon to help our clients. Stop and think, or look around now – where do you see leather, plastic or vinyl? It’s everywhere!

Why We Do It

Fibrenew’s services save customers time and money by offering an alternative to replacement. Our services are more economical than the cost of replacement and can often times be completed faster than the time it takes for replacement materials to be ordered or delivered. As an added benefit, this saves hundreds of damaged items from ending up in landfills. It’s win-win!

Who We Are

Since 1987, we have built and refined a robust franchise business system. This includes the research and development of a proprietary product line, highly specialized techniques as well as rock-solid support, operations and marketing systems. The strength of our business model, the quality of our products and services and our enthusiasm for what we do all contribute to the success of more than 245 Fibrenew franchises around the world today.

Brisbane Franchise Business Opportunities

Are you a budding entrepreneur looking for the chance to learn a new skill, truly be your own boss and take charge of your financial future? Fibrenew has an amazing mobile service franchise opportunity available right now in Central and South Brisbane! With a lean & simple operation, flexible schedule and multiple revenue streams, Fibrenew might be the right fit for you!

What We Do
Fibrenew is a niche mobile service business that restores, re-dyes and renews damaged or worn leather, plastic and vinyl in homes, offices, boats, vehicles, airplanes, medical clinics and more. Anywhere there are items like this in need of restoration, we are called upon to help our clients. Stop and think, or look around now – where do you see leather, plastic or vinyl? It’s everywhere!

Why We Do It
Fibrenew’s services save customers time and money by offering an alternative to replacement. Our services are more economical than the cost of replacement and can often times be completed faster than the time it takes for replacement materials to be ordered or delivered. As an added benefit, this saves hundreds of damaged items from ending up in landfills. It’s win-win!

Sydney Franchise Business Opportunities

Are you a budding entrepreneur looking for the chance to learn a new skill, truly be your own boss and take charge of your financial future? Fibrenew has an amazing mobile service franchise opportunity available right now in Sydney & Area! With a lean & simple operation, flexible schedule and multiple revenue streams, Fibrenew might be the right fit for you!

What We Do
Fibrenew is a niche mobile service business that restores, re-dyes and renews damaged or worn leather, plastic and vinyl in homes, offices, boats, vehicles, airplanes, medical clinics and more. Anywhere there are items like this in need of restoration, we are called upon to help our clients. Stop and think, or look around now – where do you see leather, plastic or vinyl? It’s everywhere!

Why We Do It
Fibrenew’s services save customers time and money by offering an alternative to replacement. Our services are more economical than the cost of replacement and can often times be completed faster than the time it takes for replacement materials to be ordered or delivered. As an added benefit, this saves hundreds of damaged items from ending up in landfills. It’s win-win! Visit us for more info!

How One Man Googled His Way to Owning a Fibrenew Business

You really can use Google to find anything you want. Jeff Butler can attest. Not too long ago, after realizing the need for a new career and life direction, Butler decided to type “mobile franchises under $100,000” into the search engine and see what happened. After carefully evaluating his options, Butler narrowed it down to Fibrenew, the market leaders in leather, plastic and vinyl restoration, and founded Fibrenew Central Arizona.

In order to establish his new business, Butler dedicated two weeks to the Fibrenew training program in Calgary. “It was great,” he says. “Everyone from Fibrenew is super nice and helpful. It’s a great organization to be part of.” The training program was intense, and although Butler admits it was a lot of information to absorb in such a relatively short period (ranging from techniques to product information to general business advice), he found the subsequent Fibrenew Apprenticeship Program to be a valuable component to getting Fibrenew Central Arizona up and running. “The nice thing about the Apprenticeship Program is that you can go home, go on your iPad and see the information you’re looking for and review the videos you need instead of worrying about not being able to remember what they told us in training,” he explains. “And if I can’t find what I’m looking for, the Fibrenew support team is only a phone call away.”

Prior to the initial training, Butler shadowed fellow Fibrenew franchisee owner Dan Hoffman, owner of Fibrenew Portland, for two days. That’s when he knew he’d made a smart decision to invest in his own business. “At the end of day one, I saw Dan writing up the invoices from the day and remember thinking, ‘Not bad for a day’s work!’” Butler laughs.

Being a new business, Butler’s start-up phase consists of hard work, planning and a go-get-’em attitude. “There’s no such thing as a typical day for me,” he notes. “A lot of times I’ll line up my day, but then by noon I’ve altered it already! I like that. I like being able to just go with the flow and plan my day as it happens.”

Butler has always been drawn to the “hands-on” sort of work — he has a lengthy background in the auto industry, ranging from service technician right up to service director. Because of his vast background in the automotive industry, Butler is naturally drawn to the services he can provide to the numerous used car, RV and boat dealerships in his area. Fibrenew Central Arizona tackles every sort of restoration and refurbishing a client requires — including residential and commercial contracts — but Butler expects the automotive contracts to be the largest component to his clientele.

“One of the best parts of Fibrenew is being hands-on, being able to be the person who directs daily activities, makes sure the work is accomplished correctly, being able to interact with customers. It’s a much better environment than being stuck in a cubicle,” Butler says.

Source: Fibrenew Franchising

Found in an Attic: Firsthand Accounts of World War II Experiences

Ken Gorrell of Fibrenew Lakes Region

Ken Gorrell of Fibrenew Lakes Region, grew up in an old New England farmhouse that has been in his family for generations. As a child, he would spend hours combing through the attic in search of lost treasures, convinced that there had to be an old coin, a map or other valuable trinkets waiting to be found. What he ended up discovering was an original manuscript of his grandfather’s cousin and once war-time United Press Correspondent, Henry ‘Hank’ Gorrell. “Eyewitness” as it was originally titled was a firsthand account of Hank’s war experiences from 1936 – 1943.

Ken revisited the manuscript as an adult and decided to take on the job of seeing it published as “Soldier of the Press: Covering the Front in Europe and North Africa, 1936-1943“. First, Ken spent time carefully editing the original manuscript, modernizing the spelling of place names and making sense of sections that had been cut out as a matter of security. He later fact checked the dates, names and places that Hank wrote about and finally negotiated a publishing deal with the University of Missouri Press.

ABOUT THE BOOK
Threatened by each side in the Spanish Civil War with death as a suspected spy, decorated for saving an airman’s life in a bullet-ridden B-24 Liberator over Greece, war correspondent Hank Gorrell often found himself in the thick of the fighting he had been sent to cover. And in reporting on some of the world’s most dangerous stories, he held newspaper readers spellbound with his eyewitness accounts from battlefields across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

An “exclusive” United Press correspondent, Gorrell saw more than his share of war, even more than most reporters, as his beat took him from the siege of Madrid to the sands of North Africa. His memoir, left in an attic trunk for sixty years, is presented here in its entirety for the first time. As he risks life and limb on the front lines, Gorrell gives us new perspectives on the overall conflict—including some of World War II’s lesser-known battles—as well as insights into behind-the-lines intrigue.

Gorrell’s account first captures early Axis intervention in Spain and their tests of new weaponry and blitzkrieg tactics at the cost of millions of Spanish lives. While covering the Spanish Civil War, he was captured by forces from each side and saw many brave men die disillusioned, and his writings offer a contrast to other views of that conflict from writers like Hemingway. But Spain was just Hank’s training ground: before America even entered World War II, he was embedded with Allied forces from seven nations.

When war broke out, Gorrell was sent to Hungary, where in Budapest he witnessed pro-Axis enthusiasts toast the victory of Fascist armies. Later in Romania he watched Stalin kick over the Axis apple cart with his invasion of Bessarabia—forcing the Germans to deal with the Russian menace before they had planned. Then he saw twenty Italian divisions mauled in the mountains of Albania, marking the beginning of the end for Mussolini.

Combining the historian’s accuracy with the journalist’s on-the-spot reportage, Gorrell provides eyewitness impressions of what war looked, sounded, and felt like to soldiers on the ground. Soldier of the Press weaves personal adventures into the larger fabric of world events, plunging modern readers into the heat of battle while revealing the dangers faced by war correspondents in that bygone era.

ABOUT THE EDITOR, KEN GORRELL
Ken Gorrell and his wife Holli own and operate Fibrenew Lakes Region in mid New Hampshire. To contact the Gorrell’s, visit their website at: www.fibrenew.com/lakes-region

Reblog: Driven to Achieve

With a mobile model and flat fees, Fibrenew is differentiating itself in the franchise market

Michael and Dianna Carter, of Loudoun County, Virginia purchased their Fibrenew franchise in 2001 and have since developed strong relationships with car dealerships and thus built a successful business restoring leather, plastic and vinyl materials for the automotive industry.

After moving out of the telecommunications sector into role of driver at UPS, Michael was keen to find the perfect self-employment opportunity. He found it with Fibrenew, a franchise that fit both his lifelong passion for cars and a desire to be able to enjoy his growing family.

“When my wife and I first considered a Fibrenew mobile franchise, we realized we could have both the financial freedom we sought and the flexibility to be available to our kids’ little league schedules, riding lessons and concerts at school,” says Michael.

It was the flexibility of Fibrenew’s mobile business model, which allows franchisees to build a business around their schedule, that attracted Michael and his family to Fibrenew. This, along with the flat-fee, no-royalty model secured their decision to begin their new venture with the brand.

Michael recommends that anyone interested in purchasing a franchise clearly understands the financial possibilities and challenges inherent in the system of the franchise they are researching. Fibrenew, because of the flat-fee model, doesn’t penalize growth; the earning potential is, therefore, unlimited and this allows the business to grow easily and in a variety of ways. For Michael, this has included adding a full-time technician this year, lending more flexibility and freedom to the family. It also includes part-time work for his 16-year-old son that fits around his school schedule.

“Fibrenew, because of the flat-fee model doesn’t penalize growth; the earning potential is, therefore, unlimited and allows the business to grow easily and in a variety of ways”

Michael’s expansion now includes branching out beyond automotive into medical offices and upholstery work in the commercial and residential industries. While he’s long been in love with the car industry Michael recognizes that, after a decade of establishing solid growth, there is still financial opportunity and growth in each of his territories by adopting new products and niches that Fibrenew caters for.

“Opportunity grows with us. Fibrenew allows me to build a business where I’m most comfortable, but also fully supports and provides a platform for me to push myself further,” says Michael. Click here for more the continuation of the interview!