It all starts with a tree, specifically a beech tree, usually harvested from a forest or farm somewhere in Canada or the Eastern U.S. The wood from that tree is the cornerstone of a chair that one day will grace a casino floor in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, or another far-flung corner of the globe.
It’s what happens in between that sets this chair apart, ensuring it will last despite the wear, tear and punishment that comes with day-in, day-out, 24/7 use.
Lasting Impressions
Durability has always been a guiding principle of Reno-based Gary Platt Manufacturing. In an often disposable age—and especially now, with resources and revenues in shorter supply—the firm’s clients also value the philosophy.
“We think it’s important, and our customers are asking for that too,” says CEO Joe Esposito. “A lot of our focus is on long-lasting products that are durable and reusable. Though all our chairs start with a 10-year warranty, they’re really designed to last forever. We’ve had chairs returned after 12 to 15 years, then refurbished and given new life to last another 10 or 15 years.”
For example, when an Atlantic City resort invested in new VIP chairs, it was able to repurpose existing chairs for the main floor. Such an approach reduces costs and conserves resources. It’s an idea that is gaining traction up and down the supply chain.
Research shows that support for sustainable products and practices is on the rise. According to a 2020 report from the Boston Consulting Group, 79 percent of consumers surveyed were willing to change their shopping preferences based on sustainability, and more than 60 percent of executives said sustainability increased brand value and customer loyalty. All of which lead to increased revenues.
This theory has proven particularly true in the casino industry. Gary Platt Manufacturing was founded on the premise that a comfortable chair will keep players at the slots or tables, increasing time on device and fueling profitability.
The company provides seating for the biggest names in casino games—IGT, Scientific Games, Aristocrat, Everi, Aruze, Konami—and gaming facilities of every size, from tiny slot halls in rural America to elegant European casinos to the imposing Resorts World Las Vegas, which opened in June on the Las Vegas Strip.
At Ease
The chair of our story is strong and durable but also lightweight, thanks in part to that beech tree, which Esposito calls “the softer of the hardwoods.”
Prized for its hardiness, beech has been used for millennia to make furniture, flooring, watercraft, musical instruments and so on. The logs can also be crosscut, debarked, and peeled into ribbons of veneer to make plywood, which forms the core of the Gary Platt chair. The rest of the materials—the proprietary cold-cured foam, the steel or aluminum frames, the hardware and upholstery—are also made to last, Esposito says.
Comfort isn’t overlooked in the quest for durability. In 2019, a slot player at Reno’s Tamarack Casino said his Gary Platt chair got “a lot of credit” for keeping him in the game. “When you sit in a chair for an hour, two, three hours you tend to have issues with your back,” Mike Czarnick told KOLO-TV. “So with these chairs—it’s fabulous.”
“The most important thing is comfort; it’s the key factor in how we design a chair,” says Gary Platt Head Designer Ed Abadie, who has made a career-long study of ergonomic principles and the “three Fs:” form, fit and function. Application of these principles can make the most angular, minimalist casino chair “sit well” for extended periods, ensuring the comfort of the player and offering continued support. The foam of each casino chair is sculpted to support the users’ activity, alleviating pressure points and allowing for comfort and ease.
Accidents happen, and if the seat of the chair is damaged on the casino floor, it’s quick work to replace it, says Abadie. “You’ll have a stash in the back of extra seats. You simply unscrew two screws, take the seat off and pop on a new one. It’s a lot less drama and expense that way.” It also ensures that no chair is indefinitely out of commission.
Design concepts often originate with the client, the casino operator, and it’s up to Gary Platt’s design team to take sometimes fanciful visions and make them work in real life.
“We kind of take a design, tear it down, and rebuild it our way, to make it functional,” Abadie says. Endurance and comfort are built in, and so is stability. The latter is important in a casino setting, where people of all sizes recline, sprawl, ride sidesaddle, and occasionally teeter at the edge of their seats, awaiting big jackpots.
The spread of the frame and the design of the base help the products safely withstand them all—the sprawlers, the teeterers and the would-be tippers, says Abadie.
“As you can imagine, casinos are big liability targets, and it’s super-important to us that chair’s not going to be tippable or cause any other problems for the casino.”
Measure Twice, Cut Once
Expert sewing team, doing it old-school
While sustainability is undoubtedly a buzzword and a trend, the approach could not be more traditional. Gary Platt’s manufacturing process makes the most of its materials, with every bolt of fabric and piece of wood calculated and cut for optimum use and minimum waste. “We do not create a lot of byproducts,” says Esposito.
When an order of finished chairs is ready to ship, instead of triple-wrapping the units in plastic or other prefab, hard-to-recycle materials, Gary Platt uses blankets. At the point of delivery, workers simply unload the chairs, position them on the floor, and throw the blankets back on the truck, to be returned to the factory in Reno.
“It’s great for everybody,” says Esposito. “There’s no waste and no leftover packaging materials on the back end.”
Blanket-wrapping also allows more units to be stowed onto a delivery truck. That makes for fewer delivery trips, less time on the road, less fuel, and a lower carbon footprint.
In a typical year, Gary Platt Manufacturing builds 90,000 chairs for use in resorts in North and South America, Europe and Australia (a third of those may be one of the most popular models, called the Monaco). And while it fills massive orders for thousands of chairs, it has also accommodated orders as small as five.
All for One
For even more efficiency, it’s all produced under one roof, by a team of 80-plus U.S. workers, at the Reno home base. Parts of the process, such as the laser-cutting of fabrics, are automated. But the sewing and upholstering are done the old-fashioned way, on sewing machines and by hand, as well as the final assembly.
The design team is also on the same property, says Esposito. “So when Ed’s designing something and wants to make changes or (director of engineering) Dan Waller wants to do something different, they’re able to just take those ideas right out on the production floor.
“From start to finish, our chairs are handcrafted and custom-made by expert sewers, upholsterers and assembly workers. These trained, skilled people really make it happen.”
Not surprisingly, Covid-19 has brought a few changes to the manufacturing process. Working with a partner, Gary Platt created a new line of anti-fungal, anti-mildew fabrics called Healthy Play. The material doesn’t support microbiological growth, contains no anti-bacterial chemicals, and meets stringent emission standards, for better indoor air quality.
Live Long & Prosper
Decades from now, the chair that began with a beech tree may still be in use at a casino somewhere in the world. That longevity matters to the company and its customers, from coast to coast and around the world.
“We believe we have the highest value proposition,” says Esposito. “A Gary Platt chair is going to last a long time. The longer it lasts and stays comfortable, the more money the casino makes.
“But at the end of the day, our biggest competitive advantage is that our seats are just more comfortable than everybody else’s.”
Gary Platt: An Unsurpassed Innovator
Now retired, Gary Platt last attended G2E in 2019
Sit. Stay. Play. Those three words sum up why Gary Platt is a legendary figure in the gaming industry.
More than 60 years ago, as a traveling furniture salesman, he was in Las Vegas when he stopped at a casino to play blackjack. Not only did he find the stool rickety and uncomfortable, he was astounded to see slot players on their feet in the narrow aisles, standing as they fed coins into the machines.
“I thought somebody was missing the boat there,” says Platt, who saw an opportunity to do things better—and sell a few of his company’s barstools in the bargain.
He pitched the casino operator, who sent him to the chair distributor, who told him all the reasons his idea wouldn’t work. For one thing, a blackjack stool can’t be swapped for a barstool, because it’s narrower, in order to fit seven people around the table. It also needs a shorter seat, at a height of 27 inches, and a straighter back. “But those were really easy things for our factory to do,” says Platt. Eventually, the distributor, Paul Endy, took on Platt’s line of retooled stools to great success.
Platt remained convinced casinos were losing money by forcing their slot players to stand. Again, he took his pitch to the operators, saying, “If they sit down, they’ll stay longer and play longer instead of putting in a few quarters and moving on.” The operators refused, saying there wasn’t enough room on the slot floor to install seating.
Platt persisted. He returned to Endy and said, “There’s got to be somebody who owes you a favor, or loves you—somebody I can talk to who won’t give me the same answer.”
Endy directed him to a small Vegas casino, where Platt proposed a solution: he would supply the operator with a comfortable slot stool at no cost, without obligation. If business didn’t improve, he would remove the stools, and the operator would owe nothing.
“He reluctantly said OK,” recalls Platt, “because of Paul.”
Platt shipped two dozen chairs to the casino, enough to equip one slot aisle. And bingo.
“People flocked to try the stools, and the drop on that one aisle rose, not 5 or 10 percent, but astronomically.” Soon slot manufacturers were lining up for stools, including a company called Sircoma, which eventually became IGT. “With the amount of stools they bought, it was utterly fantastic,” says Platt. “We started getting all the manufacturers.”
He innovated on the chair designs as needed, devising wider bases, adding brackets to attach the stools to the machine, and so on. “I wasn’t a designer, but I found things that were needed and took them back to the factory, where they made things happen.” Platt became so closely associated with casino chairs that in the late 1990s, when his colleagues Leonard Einhorn and Bob Yabroff formed a manufacturing company, they called it Gary Platt Manufacturing, with the tag line: Unsurpassed.
“I didn’t make too many mistakes,” Platt acknowledges. “But just because my name is on the door doesn’t mean I knew everything. The factory was wonderful with coming up with solutions.”
At 95, he is now an elder statesman of the gaming industry. And though Platt retired 10 years ago, he still keeps an eye on the business that bears his name. “If there’s something I think is useful, I pass it on.”
Asked the secret of his success, Platt credits inquisitiveness “and knowing things can be better. ‘How can I help people?’ was a big thing with our company. If people were having a difficult time with something, I would ask, ‘Is there a better way to do it?’”
Of course, there was a little bit of luck involved, too, he says. Vegas-style luck. “My whole future was changed by going to play blackjack that night.”
