Nevada: Gary Platt celebrates 1 million chairs with party at Reno headquarters

June 23, 2022 4:07 PM
  • Rege Behe, CDC Gaming Reports
June 23, 2022 4:07 PM
  • Rege Behe, CDC Gaming Reports

What do a million chairs look like?

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One million chairs will fill approximately 14 NFL stadiums to capacity. One million is the number of tickets already sold for Bruce Springsteen’s   international tour in 2023. And one million is about 150,00 less than the total attendance at Pittsburgh Pirates’ home games in 2021.

It’s also the number of chairs Gary Platt Manufacturing has produced for the casino industry since 1997.

“When we started, we didn’t have this grand plan in place,” says CEO Joe Esposito. “It was just a couple of thousand chairs per year. It was just a small corner of the current warehouse in 1997 and now it’s an 88,000- square-foot building turning out 70,000-80,000 chairs a year.”

The company celebrated the million-chair milestone this week at its Reno headquarters with cake, speeches, and an appearance by Bob Yabroff, who co-founded the company in 1996. There also was a videotaped message from Gary Platt, the company’s pioneering salesman, whose name became synonymous with casino seating in Nevada.

Platt expressed amazement that the company bearing his name has sold a million chairs.

“You sold things either in Las Vegas or Reno and there really was nothing in between,” Platt said. “And then all of a sudden, we find that the (chairs) we’re manufacturing are far beyond the quality of anyone else.”

Esposito admits that the fortunes of Gary Platt Manufacturing, which relocated to Nevada from California in 1997, took off with the legalization of gambling in jurisdictions outside the Silver State.

“Growth has been solid and steady,” he says. “It’s not like we had this dramatic increase all at once. But in the last 10-15 years, we’ve been able to gradually grow our team size and get people in place to handle the volume.”

The company currently has more than 120 employees, many of whom joined the celebration, along with Nevada Assembly member Natha Anderson and Reno Aces baseball mascot Archie.

Gary Platt currently supplies seating to IGT, Bally, Aristocrat, WMS, Multimedia, Aruze, and Konami to pair with their games. The company has also installed chairs at properties including Resorts World Las Vegas, the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood, and the sportsbook at Parx Casino in Philadelphia.

As the acknowledged leader in casino seating, Esposito admits there are challenges. The company’s designs have been copied and competitors sometimes try to undercut Gary Platt sales with less expensive products.

“More important than enforcing our patents is creating new and exciting innovation all the time,” Esposito says. “We have to be the leader in this. People expect new designs; they expect innovation. They expect our chairs to be better than everyone else’s, so that absolutely is a key driving factor in the business. Our competition is coming after us; they really are trying to get better. … We can’t just keep our quality and products at the same levels. We have to continue to lead the industry.”

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