Gary Platt Manufacturing

In 1959 a Southern California furniture man named Gary Platt walked onto the floor of a Las Vegas casino, noticed that every slot machine had a player standing at it, and concluded that the casino was leaving money on the floor by the simple omission of a chair. Some persuading and a few demonstration units later, Platt had quietly inaugurated a category. The firm that bears his name was founded in 1997 and moved to Reno in 1999, and by the summer of 2022 had built its one-millionth casino chair on a single line in a single building.

The firm makes performance seating, exclusively for casinos — slot chairs, table-game chairs, poker chairs, bar-top stools, and bingo seating — designed against the operating constraint that a player’s time-on-device is a function, in part, of the comfort of the chair beneath them. Gary Platt’s customers are the casino operators of North America: tribal gaming, commercial casinos in Nevada and the Atlantic seaboard, and casino-resort properties internationally. All design, upholstery, frame fabrication, and assembly happens at the Reno facility; the firm’s recently launched hospitality-seating division extends the same operating discipline to non-gaming bar and restaurant seating.

What distinguishes Gary Platt Manufacturing in its sector is its specialism. The firm makes one category of chair, for one industry, in one place; that focus has produced a quality of build and a depth of casino-floor knowledge that broader-line furniture manufacturers struggle to match. The casino-floor metric the firm sells against — that the right chair lifts revenue per slot machine — is unusual in commercial seating, and Gary Platt’s catalogue of named chair models, each tuned to a particular gaming context, reflects that.

The practice has worked with Gary Platt Manufacturing at the Reno facility on Lean process implementation across operations.