COM stands for Customer’s Own Material, the practice in which the buyer supplies the upholstery fabric to the furniture manufacturer rather than selecting a covering from the maker’s own line. In FF&E, meaning furniture, fixtures, and equipment, COM is one of the most common and most misunderstood specification terms, because it changes who is responsible for the textile and for its performance. When a spec sheet reads COM, the designer or procurement team has chosen the fabric, purchased it separately, and directed it to the factory to be applied to a specified frame. The leather equivalent is COL, Customer’s Own Leather. This page explains how COM works and why it is specified, inside the wider FF&E specification guide. For the underlying definition of the package, see what FF&E is.
Why designers specify COM
A furniture manufacturer maintains a line of gradable fabrics, priced in tiers, that it applies to its frames. Specifying from that line is simple, but it constrains the designer to what the maker offers and folds the fabric cost, plus the maker’s markup, into the piece. COM breaks that constraint. By supplying the covering, the design team can use any mill’s textile, control the exact color, pattern, and hand across every piece in the property, and often buy the fabric at a trade price rather than through the furniture maker. On a hotel where lobby seating, guest-room chairs, and restaurant banquettes must read as one coordinated scheme, COM is frequently the only way to hold a single fabric story across items from different manufacturers.
The trade-off is coordination. COM moves the responsibility for the textile onto the buyer. If the fabric arrives late, is short of yardage, or fails a performance requirement at the factory, the delay and the cost sit with the buyer, not the furniture maker. COM buys design control at the price of managing another supply chain, which is why it belongs to a disciplined procurement process rather than a casual one.
The data a COM specification must carry
A COM callout is not simply a fabric name. For the factory to apply it correctly and for the piece to pass inspection, the specification has to carry a defined set of fields, and a missing field is where COM goes wrong.
- Yardage: the amount of fabric required per piece, calculated from the frame and the fabric width, plus the overage the mill and factory need. Underestimating yardage is the classic COM error, because a shortfall stops production until more fabric ships, often from a different dye lot.
- Fabric width and content: the usable width and the fiber content, both of which affect yardage, wear, and cleaning.
- Pattern repeat: the vertical and horizontal distance over which a pattern repeats. A large repeat raises yardage sharply, because the factory must align the pattern across cushions and panels and wastes fabric doing so.
- Railroading: whether the fabric can be applied sideways, with the width running horizontally along a long piece such as a sofa or banquette. A railroaded fabric can cover a long seat back without a seam; a non-railroaded fabric cannot, which again changes yardage and appearance.
- Backing and finish: whether the fabric is backed for upholstery use, and any applied stain or moisture treatment.
These fields are why a COM item on a spec sheet is more demanding than a graded selection, and why the FF&E spec sheet anatomy treats the textile block as one of the most error-prone parts of the document.
Performance and compliance still apply
The most dangerous misconception about COM is that supplying your own fabric relaxes the performance requirements. It does the opposite. When the buyer selects the covering, the buyer also assumes responsibility for proving that the covering meets the contract-grade standards the project demands. A furniture maker applying its own graded fabric certifies that fabric’s performance; a factory applying COM certifies the frame and the workmanship, but the covering’s performance is the buyer’s to verify.
That verification references the same test data that governs any contract textile. The ACT Voluntary Performance Guidelines codify the categories a hospitality fabric should be documented against, including abrasion, colorfastness to light, wet and dry crocking, and flammability. Abrasion in particular is measured by defined laboratory tests such as the Martindale cycle count and the Wyzenbeek double-rub count, and a COM should meet the same threshold the project would demand of a graded fabric. The relationship between these numbers and real durability is covered in fabric grades and durability.
Flammability is the compliance line that cannot be waived. An upholstered item on a hospitality project must satisfy the flame requirement for its jurisdiction and occupancy, and for the smolder resistance of upholstered components that requirement is commonly California Technical Bulletin 117-2013. A COM that has not been confirmed to the applicable flame code is not a saving, it is a nonconformance waiting to be discovered at inspection. The wider landscape sits in contract furniture standards explained.
Coordinating the COM supply chain
Because COM splits the piece into a frame from one supplier and a fabric from another, the procurement team has to run two schedules in parallel and land them together at the factory. The fabric has to be ordered early enough to arrive before the frames enter production, in the correct total yardage including overage, from a single dye lot so that every piece matches, and with the performance and flame documentation in hand. A single reserve of extra yardage is usually ordered as attic stock so that a later repair matches the original run, a practice described in attic stock explained.
The purchasing agent typically tracks each COM as a distinct line: which pieces it covers, the yardage committed, the dye lot, the ship date to the factory, and the compliance documents received. When any of these is missing, production stops, because a factory cannot upholster a frame with fabric it does not yet have. Owners who treat COM casually discover this the hard way, when a single late fabric shipment holds an entire seating order and threatens the opening date.
COL and the leather variant
The leather equivalent of COM is COL, Customer’s Own Leather, and it carries the same logic with a few added wrinkles. Leather is sold by the hide, measured in square feet rather than linear yards, and hides are natural and irregular, so the usable area per hide is always less than the gross area once the buyer cuts around brands, scars, and thin sections. A COL specification therefore has to state the area required per piece with a generous cutting allowance, the hide type and finish, and the grade of leather, because a shortfall of hides stops production just as a shortfall of fabric yardage does. Dye-lot behavior is even more pronounced with leather, since natural hides vary batch to batch, which makes ordering the full quantity, including attic stock, from one run more important, not less. The compliance and performance obligations transfer to the buyer in the same way, and a COL still has to meet the flame requirement for the occupancy.
How COM changes the cost accounting
COM also changes how the piece is costed, which procurement teams have to account for cleanly. When a covering comes from the maker’s graded line, the fabric cost is embedded in the quoted price of the piece. When the buyer supplies COM, the furniture quote covers the frame, the labor, and the maker’s application charge, but not the covering, which the buyer purchases separately and often at a trade price. A bid comparison that fails to separate these can look distorted, because a COM quote appears lower than a graded quote for reasons that have nothing to do with the vendor being cheaper. Disciplined bid leveling normalizes for this, adding the separately purchased fabric cost, its freight to the factory, and any application surcharge back into the total delivered cost so that COM and graded options are compared on the same basis. Handled loosely, the fabric cost hides in a separate ledger and the true cost of the piece is understated.
When COM is worth it
COM is worth the coordination when design control matters more than simplicity, which on a branded or design-led hotel is most of the time. It gives the design team a single coordinated textile scheme across pieces from many makers, access to any mill’s product, and often a better price on the fabric itself. It costs the buyer the responsibility of managing yardage, dye lots, lead time, and compliance for every covering in the package. The correct posture is neither to avoid COM nor to specify it loosely, but to specify it completely: full yardage with overage, repeat and railroading stated, backing defined, and abrasion and flame performance documented before the fabric ships. Specified that way, COM delivers exactly the coordinated, contract-grade result it is meant to. Specified loosely, it becomes the single most common source of delay in a hospitality FF&E program.