Eric Segal has a challenge for anyone who stops by Gary Platt Manufacturing’s booth at the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas this week.
First, he asks a visitor to sit in a chair. It’s a decent chair, suitable for the gaming industry and its hospitality sector.
Then, he ushers the visitor into a chair manufactured by the Gary Platt’s new Sierra Nevada Hospitality division. It looks like the other chair, but features the company’s trademark foam that has been limited to gaming-floor seats.
“We’re marrying that foam to hospitality,” says Segal, who was named president of Sierra Nevada Hospitality on September 29. “It’s the first time ever for a competitively priced chair to have that foam married to a beautiful frame. And the Platt foam is coming to market for the hospitality industry for the first time at (G2E).”
Sierra Nevada Hospitality was launched to give the chairs Gary Platt makes for casino seating outside the gaming floor a separate identity. Using AlumWood frames, the chairs are designed to bring levels of comfort to areas where casino operators traditionally would rather not have customers linger. But Segal believes that there’s been a recent paradigm shift in terms of how gaming operators look at hospitality seating.
“There’s a need to offer your customers, when they’ve lost some money or even won some money or want to go sit down and enjoy a buffet, to be comfortable,” says Segal, who worked as a manager at Senova Seating before joining Gary Platt. “Or for someone sitting in a conference room for eight hours in a meeting to be comfortable.”
In addition to giving value to customers, a chair’s sustainability is important. Segal says some hospitality chairs require replacing foam after a mere five years. The chairs produced by Sierra Nevada Hospitality use foam guaranteed to last for 10 years.
“You put together a beautiful frame that’s going to last,” Segal says. “You put together some beautiful fabric that’s going to last. But you put it on foam that’s not going to last. So where’s the value to your customers when you have to throw away foam in five or six years? … The foam in our chairs has the greatest longevity in the market.”
