Commercial Folding Chairs

Work from your largest realistic seated layout, then add a working margin for breakages and for the chairs that are always out being used somewhere else. Venues that order exactly the maximum seat count end up short within a year.

Also check what you can store. The folded or stacked dimensions per chair are on the product page, and the limit on a venue is almost always the storeroom rather than the floor.

Folding chairs pack thinner, so they suit a narrow cupboard and a venue that puts the whole room away for functions and overflow. Stacking chairs are quicker to set out, look more like dining chairs when they are up, and are what you want for footpath seating that goes out and comes back in every day.

If the room is reset several times a week, the speed of setting out usually beats the storage saving. If it is reset a few times a year, pack them flat.

Steel frames take the most handling and are the common choice for halls and clubs. The folding range is steel, PP and HDPE, and the moulded PP and HDPE chairs are lighter to carry, which staff notice on a hundred-chair reset. Powder coated steel is fine indoors and under an awning, but the coating chips where chairs get stacked and dragged, and rust starts at the chip.

Whichever one you buy, look at how the seat is fixed to the frame and whether the fixings can be tightened. A folding chair is a set of moving joints, and joints that cannot be re-tightened cannot be maintained.

Some can, and the product page says so. The HDPE and PP folding chairs are fine wet. A powder coated steel chair left out in weather rusts wherever the coating has been chipped, and on a folding chair that is usually a joint or a foot. Where chairs are used outside regularly, buy a set rated for it and keep the indoor set indoors.

For an outdoor area that is used year round, the furniture is only half of it — shade and heat decide whether the seats fill. Look at commercial outdoor umbrellas and outdoor portable heaters alongside the seating.

On a trolley made for it. Carrying stacks by hand is how chairs get dropped, walls get marked and backs get hurt, and it is slow. Chair trolleys are matched to a chair style, so buy the trolley with the chairs rather than after. The general-purpose range is commercial kitchen trolleys.

Plan the route as well as the trolley — a lift, a ramp or a doorway decides how many you can move at once. If the room is also being set with food service, catering trolleys and buffet and table service go down the same path.

For a two-hour lunch, a padded folding chair is fine. For a full-day conference, people notice. If the room regularly hosts long sittings, pay for padding and a shaped back rather than the cheapest frame, or keep a set of better chairs for those bookings.

There is no substitute for sitting in one before you buy a hundred. Tell us the event length and we will point you at the chairs in the range that suit it.

Go through the set on a schedule and tighten every fixing you can reach. Then look at the folding mechanism, the feet and the point where the seat meets the frame. A chair that creaks or flexes when you rock it is on the way out.

Replace rather than repair anything with a cracked frame weld. Worn feet are worth fixing, because a chair with a missing foot marks floors and wobbles. Spare feet and fixings sit with the rest of the spares and accessories range.