VICTORVILLE • If you've reupholstered a sofa — or, ideally, a few hundred sofas — Robert Cottam wants to talk to you.

Cottam's United Furniture Industries is preparing to throw the switches on two production lines at its new Victorville plant, where the Mississippi-based company will make and distribute affordable upholstered furniture under brand names such as Simmons.

But UFI has so far come up short of the 70 workers it had planned to hire by the Nov. 14 opening, in spite of nearly 1,000 locals showing up to a job fair in October.

“We didn’t find as much skilled labor as we’d hoped,” Cottam said, with the company looking to quickly hire another 20 workers with experience in upholstery.

“If we can get our work force trained and the economy stays stable, we should be fully employed at about 400 people in a year or less,” the company spokesman touted from a front office at UFI’s new High Desert home.

You could almost squeeze nine football fields into the 505,162-square-foot warehouse UFI has taken over at Southern California Logistics Airport.

“We don’t have anything this big, this open, with this many doors,” Cottam said.

Stirling Capital Investments, Victorville’s private partner in developing SCLA, built a 1 million-square -foot warehouse along Air Expressway in 2009. This year Stirling subdivided the building to accommodate UFI on the east side, with the slightly smaller western half going to M&M/Mars as the candy company relocates from Foxborough Industrial Park.

Cottam’s team is hoping the large building will allow the company to launch its most efficient operation yet, with room to grow in coming years.

It was no quick decision choosing Victorville for the company’s first West Coast site, Cottam said, citing a “grueling” selection process that spanned six western states and 40 or 50 potential sites.

“When we got here, it just felt right,” he said. “This is more of our kind of place as southerners.”

California’s regulatory environment and worker’s compensation insurance policies didn’t help UFI’s case, but Cottam said there were enough positives to outweigh those negatives.

“You heard people from outside say, ‘You’re crazy to go to California,’ ” he said. “But if you run a clean operation and do it right, it’s no different than anywhere else.”

UFI’s operation will involve local companies to provide raw materials for the 70 varieties of couches, love seats and chairs it produces for retailers.

Those vendors will bring in lumber cut to size and workers at the SCLA plant will assemble the frames, while another crew will work to stuff and upholster the cushions. Then the sofa is assembled, packaged for shipping and loaded onto trucks destined for the western United States — all within two days.