Most event furniture is not built for the conditions of a hire fleet or busy venue. Here is what goes wrong, and what we did about it.
Most event furniture is not built for the conditions of a hire fleet or busy venue. Here is what goes wrong, and what we did about it.
Most event furniture is not built for the conditions of a hire fleet. It is built to look good in a catalogue, survive a few uses and be replaced. That is fine for occasional private use. It is not fine for commercial operations.
A chair in a hire fleet might go to two hundred events in a year. It gets stacked fifteen high, loaded onto a van, unloaded, set up, sat on, stacked again, and put back in the van. Then it does it again the following day.
Consumer furniture is not designed for that cycle. Frames loosen at the joints after repeated loading. Finishes scratch and discolour. Stacking damages the feet, legs and back rails. And when a piece needs replacing, the new batch often does not quite match what was ordered eighteen months ago.
Most hire companies buy from the same commercial catalogues. The products are designed to a price point, not a performance standard. Suppliers change components between production runs. The chair you ordered in year one may be built differently from the one you order in year three, even if the product code is the same.
For a venue or hire company running a large fleet, that inconsistency matters. Mismatched chairs at a wedding or conference look unprofessional. They also make stacking and storage less efficient when profiles do not match.
We stopped sourcing from catalogues and started designing our own products. We visit manufacturers in China directly, specifying the materials, the construction methods and the finish for each item. When a supplier cannot meet the standard, we find one who can.
The test for any product entering the EventPro® range is straightforward: would we put it in our own hire fleet and trust it for two hundred events a year? If not, it does not go in the range.
Frames that do not loosen. Finishes that hold up to handling. Products that stack consistently because the dimensions are held to tolerance between production runs. And a range where the chair you order this year matches the one you ordered two years ago, because we control the specification rather than a third-party catalogue supplier.
The EventPro® folding chair is one example. We rebuilt the specification from scratch. The result is a chair that holds up to commercial use rather than just looking like it might — and it has been used at Wimbledon, the British Grand Prix and the Commonwealth Games to prove it.
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