7 Top Tips When Buying New Café Furniture For Your Business

Whether you’re a new café business looking to set up from scratch or a well-established venue looking to add that wow factor to your space, one of the most important aspects to get right is your café seating and tables. You can serve the best coffee in the world and have some exquisite food to boot, but if the seating or table arrangements aren’t right, the bottom line is that people simply won’t hang around. Before long you could find yourself loosing customers .With this in mind, here are 7 top tips to help you nail it.

Get the layout right

One of the hardest things to get right is the floor layout. One the one hand you need to fully maximise your floor space in terms of the number of seats available, but on the other hand, you don’t want to overcrowd your space so that your customers and waiting staff can’t move around comfortably. Consider mixing and matching different tables and chair arrangements. Also consider bar stools and dry bar tables for awkward recesses or areas where space is tight.

Say it with style

These days customer’s expect more from their café other than regimented and frankly, bland seating. What’s more it’s the first thing they notice, before tasting your wonderful food and great coffee, so it has to be right. Try opting for a particular style, theme or design. Whether it’s traditional, classic, rustic, modern-contemporary, retro, or even eclectic, your furniture should fit effortlessly in to that. The good news is that there are a wide variety of styles of furniture on the market to match so it really pays to have a style in mind and choose accordingly.

Are they of commercial quality?

Don’t get suckered into purchasing great looking furniture, then realising only too late that it wasn’t built for commercial use. Commercial furniture is made to withstand the rigours of a busy café, restaurant or bistro. It’s generally made from durable materials such as powder coated steel, chrome, laminated or synthetic woods and plastics, which are usually impervious to stains. That said, it doesn’t mean that the furniture you choose has to be boring. Commercial café furniture has come a long way in recent years and now there are some great looking pieces of furniture out there. All you have to do is to find them.

Don’t forget comfort

Comfort is key when it comes to buying commercial furniture. If you like a particular design then sit in it yourself and think about whether you’d be happy drinking a latte on this particular piece of furniture. Get it wrong and people won’t hang around, it’s as simple as that!

Does it suit your purpose?

For café furniture to be truly effective it needs to suit the purpose it was purchased for. For example, if it needs to be moved around as the needs of your customers dictate, then your furniture should be both durable and lightweight. If you have limited space, the you might need furniture that’s easily stackable. Alternatively If you have outside space then you might want to consider café furniture that’s designed for both indoor and outdoor use.

What about colour?

If you’re going for a particular theme or design then the colour of your furniture is equally important. If the furniture you like has a strong colour then you might decide to build your design around that. Alternatively if you already have a colour scheme in mind, then make sure your furniture fits right in.

Cost

Café furniture can range from bargain basement to top of the range and obviously this is reflected in the end price you pay. In many cases the cost goes hand in hand with the quality. Therefore, if you want furniture that’s going to last then the price generally reflects this. As such it’s advisable to try and pay as much as you can afford. Web based furniture suppliers can often offer the best value-for-money prices because they aren’t running bricks and mortar showrooms. The savings they make in utilities, building rental and staff costs can often be passed on to the customer, meaning you often get better grade furniture for your money.

By considering all of these factors you’ll be able to choose a type of furniture that works perfectly for you and your clientèle.

At Cafe Solutions we have a wide range of café furniture to choose from. Contact us on 07 3205 1616 where our staff would be more than happy to help you find the perfect furniture for your needs.