If you were once young enough to spend your summers with the classic American lawn chair in the background, you’re probably old enough now to get annoyed pulling yourself up out of the current deep-pocket camping chairs. The bad news is, you’re not getting any younger; the good news is, your chair is back. Back in the 60s and 70s, US-made lawn chairs were everywhere, and most of those companies bought their webbing from Waltrich Plastics. But around 1980, chairs produced overseas started out-pricing the US chairs, and then the camping “bag chair” showed up. Folding lawn chair production lines in the US slowly shut down one by one until there were none.
Waltrich Plastics kept going with other products like extruded yarns, fabrics, and ropes, and over the years the family operation was put in the hands of the next generation: Gary Pokrandt and his brother Mark Pokrandt. Gary’s son, Andrew, tells about the ‘Ah-ha’ moment they had in 2009, “We had tons of the webbing in storage in our warehouse, just old webbing that was stored there, and people kept asking for it and we kept selling it bit by bit. And we came up with the idea, ‘Well why don’t we call one of our old customers and see if we could buy their equipment from ‘em, and start making these chairs.’ Because no one made ‘em… It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we can’t find them,’ literally nobody made the chair. It just didn’t exist anymore.” “And so we bought some real old equipment and hired a few people and tried to make it work, and just started making chairs… We designated a little corner [of the Waltrich Plastics plant] for Lawn Chair USA.” Just like that, the US-made aluminum lawn chair was back.
“We would rather make them here and employ people here, and have a factory here, and just do it ourselves. We like it that way…”
In 2015 sales had grown enough to warrant a dedicated facility, and in May of 2016 Lawn Chair USA moved from Walthourville, Georgia to Fort Pierce, Florida. “Because at this point we were making so many chairs we needed our own space… Basically we’ve completely redone ourselves… We’ve got twice the space, we’ve got our own building, we’ve got our own crew, we’ve got everything like that, and we have literally doubled our business in the past year. Things have been kinda crazy but honestly we can’t figure out how to make all the chairs we’re selling, and that’s our biggest problem – Is try to figure out how to make all the chairs that keep coming in in orders. It’s a good problem to have.”
Unfortunately just as history sometimes repeats itself, Lawn Chairs USA has seen foreign-made chairs once again showing up in the folding lawn chair market next to theirs, “The chairs are lookalikes but of inferior quality.” And once again they are underpricing the US-made aluminum classics. “Some people say, ‘Why are you so expensive? Why don’t you go over to China? Why don’t you do this?’ And that’s the exact reason: because we make them over here. The cost of the parts and the labor is very expensive compared to what we could achieve if we were making them overseas. However, my family’s always made stuff in the United States, and we do strive for that and we don’t really want to go anywhere else… We would rather make them here and employ people here, and have a factory here, and just do it ourselves. We like it that way… I know people who sell stuff from China, and what they do is sit at a desk and they order stuff and they sell it and they don’t ever touch it; they don’t make it… And for us, here, we have people, we make the chair, we know the product. It’s a whole different work environment and something that we would rather have… We make a product that we know is going to last years and years. And we purposely make it that way.”
Hopefully quality, tradition, and “Made in the USA” holds up this round against the chairs that compete on price. And who knows what nostalgia the new breed of US chairs will create with the youngsters playing around them today.
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Lawn Chair USA Webbing Chair (Deluxe, Red and White with White Arms)
