American Seating Company

Private Company Incorporated: 1887 as Grand Rapids School Furniture
Company Employees: 895 Sales: $93.2 million NAIC: 337214 Nonwood Office
Furniture Manufacturing; 337127 Institutional Furniture Manufacturing;
337211 Wood Office Furniture Manufacturing

American Seating Company is a private company based in Grand Rapids,
Michigan, that has been involved in the seating business since the
1880s. Markets include education, sports and entertainment,
transportation, commercial business, government, and renovation. The
company's original focus, the education division, offers a
wide variety of seating products, desks, and tables for classrooms,
lecture halls, and common areas. American Seating is also well known
for its sports and entertainment work, its chairs installed in such
venerable institutions as Boston's Fenway Park,
Chicago's Wrigley Field, and New York City's
Radio City Music Hall. For more than half a century, American Seating
has also been involved in the transportation industry, providing seats
for buses and rail travel. Since the 1970s American Seating has
provided contract office furniture products for both the commercial and
government markets. Finally, American Seating offers refurbishing
services to restore its older seating products.

ORIGINS

While success came quickly, the company's independence
was also fleeting. In 1899, Grand Rapids School Furniture and 18 other
furniture manufacturers merged to create American Furniture Company,
the headquarters of which resided in New York City. Although the
products were now made under the American Seating banner, the
innovative spirit of Grand Rapids School Furniture remained intact. For
the school market, the company in 1901 introduced the Model101, a
tubular steel standard desk. It then developed the Friction Side, an
adjustable chair and independent desk. This led to the Universal Desk
in 1921, which joined the adjustment chair and desk. The company also
did considerable business in the entertainment field with the
introduction of the squeak-free theatre folding chair. It also took
advantage of a wave of baseball parks that were built in the early
years of the 1900s, as old wooden ballparks, prone to fire, were
replaced by concrete and steel edifices. In 1912 American Seating
installed the seats in Boston's Fenway Park, followed later
by Wrigley Field, Comiskey Park, and other ballparks. In the 1930s it
began producing seats for buses, as well as church pews and related
furniture.

The company regained its independence in 1927 as publicly traded
America Seating Company, and then moved its headquarters back to Grand
Rapids in 1932. Like many companies during the Great Depression of the
1930s, American Seating endured difficult times. It suspended the
payment of dividends in 1930, then lost money for three straight years
before posting a profit of $134,075 in 1934 and $330,262 in 1935. The
company had turned the corner, but it would not fully regain momentum
until the economy revived the business of its customers. It would
require a world war to make that happen. During the war years of 1942
to 1945, American Seating devoted much of its energies to supporting
the military effort. Not only did it produce tables and chairs for Navy
war rooms and other military uses, it also made spar caps for the
Douglas A-26 dive bomber, wooden training models of antiaircraft guns,
seats for tanks and ejector seats for airplanes, airplane and glider
wings, and ammunition boxes. The company produced five million folding
chairs alone during the war years, on average 10,000 per day.

POSTWAR POPULATION BOOM SPURS BUSINESS

After the war and a brief recession, the U.S. economy roared to life
and American Seating took full advantage. It closed the decade with
sales in the neighborhood of $25 million. For many years the company
continued to serve the military, producing aluminum airframe components
and inertia safety reels for airplane pilots. But military sales
accounted for a modest part of American Seating's revenues,
which were more impacted by the rapid growth of the school market, a
function of the country's rising population. From 1941 to
1950 the U.S. population increased by 19.3 million to more than 151
million. Moreover, from 1950 to 1954 another 10 million people were
added. As servicemen returned home from World War II, married, and
began raising the baby boom generation, they moved to the suburbs,
where schools had to be built and furnished. Aside from providing
chairs and desks, American Seating would also distribute a wide variety
of school supplies manufactured by other companies, including
chalkboards, paper, and pencils. By 1954 the company's
annual revenues topped $35 million, of which 60 percent were school
related. In1956 sales exceeded $40 million. According to a
Barron's National Business and Financial Weekly article,
"Since 1939 its sales have increased 30% faster than the
Gross National Product. Perhaps more impressively, the past nine years
have seen American Seating boost its volume at a rate nearly comparable
to that of hard-driving General Motors, and faster than either Standard
Oil of New Jersey or du Pont."