A Container of Canopy Chairs

A few of you have asked how the Original Canopy Chair is selling, after seeing it in Target, Sports Authority, Ace Hardware, etc... this Spring. (For those of you who don't know, I'm the General Manager of Renetto, the company that invented and sells the canopy chair. It was conceived in part by Paul Robinett, who also owns the store I manage as well as being a YouTube celebrity.)

Well, chair sales are booming! So much so that we're having to order containers of chairs almost monthly in order to keep the chairs in stock. It can be a bit hard to visualize ordering thousands of chairs from overseas in a "container" and unloading them into our warehouse if you've never seen it done, so here are a few visuals:

This is a 40 foot container placed on a semi truck for transport. Our containers come across the pacific on a huge barge, with thousands of other containers of similar size. They are then placed on a train at a port on the West coast and railed across the country to a trucking company in Ohio that dispatches our container to us after I set up a time. It takes about 3 weeks for the chairs to travel from the manufacturer to us in Columbus.

We then put together a crew of 10-12 people from friends and family in town and we meet the driver at our warehouse and start unloading! If we're lucky, it's a beautiful 65 degree day, like it was yesterday! (We've also done this in 90 degree heat...not so fun!)

My Operations Manager (and fellow Goose), Karl, organizes the jobs and divides them up - we have people in the truck calling out colors and passing down chairs. People on the ground load them onto carts and dollies and take them into the warehouse.
This is the warehouse- it is organized "neapolitan-style," we like to say; basically in columns of colors (we offer 10 or so). Each layer of 10 chairs (2 per box) is numbered so that, at a glance, we can tell exactly how many of each color we have.

It went very smoothly, and we were done in an hour and a half, which is a record for us! So, we're all stocked up and ready to keep filling orders...they've ramped up exponentially over the last few weeks! And, if unloading a container of chairs sounds like a way you'd want to spend an evening, let me know and I'll add your name to the contact list! :)