Lasee Upholstery Celebrates 65 Years in Business

Bernice and Wally Lasee were more than married partners.

“We were a team,” Bernice said.

That team at Lasee Upholstery on Maple Street in Sturgeon Bay came to an end when Wally died on Jan. 24, 2002, but the business regrouped with the introduction of grandson Kale to help take Lasee Upholstery into what is its 65th year of business and beyond.

Kale and Bernice Lasee at Lasee Upholstery, 87 W. Maple St., Sturgeon Bay. Photo by Jim Lundstrom.

Ask Bernice what it is that makes a business survive and thrive for so many years and she says honestly, “I really don’t know. Maybe it’s that we worked together and got along good together. You have to if you’re going to work together. But it was a lot of hard work, determination.”

Bernice said but for two exceptions where they tried outside help, Lasee Upholstery has been strictly a family affair.

“In the early years, my husband hired one of the guys he went to school with, but he was not a good salesperson. What that did, in effect, was put me in charge of doing the selling, and put him on the road. That didn’t work out. So we figured, why hire somebody if he’s not turning out the work that should be done. That’s basically how I got more into it. One other time we hired another fella, but we’d get too many jobs back. You can’t run a business that way.”

So Wally decided to keep it in-house and taught Bernice the upholstery business.

“I learned from my husband,” she said. “He had to have help and there was nobody qualified to do it, so he showed me what to do.”

That was an especially smart move when marine canvas work started

Wally Lasee works on a boat canvas. Submitted photo.

coming their way.

“At first we didn’t do marine canvas work, just upholstering,” she said. “We really didn’t get into a lot of the canvas work probably until the late ’60s. There was a need for canvas work. The Yacht Harbor had a man who probably prodded my husband into canvas work. And he liked it. He was very good at it. We’ve done work for all over the world. We did a lot of work for Palmer Johnson and The Yacht Harbor. After a while, I took charge of most of the furniture upholstering, and the bookkeeping, which freed up my husband to do boat work. There was a lot of it, 16 hours a day sometimes.”

Eventually, Wally even taught Bernice canvas work.

“I made a lot of small boat tops and a lot of the repairs,” she said. “That’s something I felt confident doing rather than building something new. I loved what I do and still love it. I’m still down here plugging around once in a while.”

But much of the canvas work rests on 24-year-old grandson Kale’s shoulders these days.

“He has been doing a lot of the canvas work. He did schooling in Ohio and Florida. But they didn’t teach furniture upholstery,” Bernice said. “I’ve been teaching him. He’s been doing well.”

Bernice was taught the upholstery business from her husband, Wally, and she now passes that knowledge on to her grandson Kale. Submitted photo.

“There’s a lot of meaning behind everything we do here,” Kale said. “You’re not just working for the customer, you’re also building onto the heritage in these walls here. I’ve been doing it roughly for seven years now, trying to keep up with all the quality my grandparents produced. They left quite a name, so I have to work real hard.”

“I think sometimes he’d like to fire me,” Bernice said.

“Sometimes I want to fire myself,” Kale said. “Overall, it’s a great thing to be in, the family business, you just can’t compare it to anything else.”

Lasee Upholstering, 87 W. Maple St., Sturgeon Bay, 920.743.2082