In its 15th year, 4Topps’ business is taking off. During that time, the sports venue seating company has worked with more than 250 sports and entertainment customers, putting a variety of products — built around its innovative mesh seat — in underutilized parts of (mostly) stadiums and helping them generate more revenue.
The college market — rapidly adapting its venues to modern standards — has proven especially lucrative to 4Topps in recent years. It put 25,000 mesh seats into Florida State’s renovated Doak Campbell Stadium last year, with another 17,000 ordered for South Florida’s under-construction football stadium.
The company is rolling out a more durable 2.0 version of its mesh chair and it’s gaining traction with a pop-up loge box concept that consists of a prebuilt table with four chairs that can be forklifted around a university campus. Miami (Ohio), for example, lined a beer garden with them at its football stadium, then moved them to the basketball arena later in the year.
Universities tend to own and operate numerous sports venues, which can create a compounding effect for a successful vendor. At FSU, 4Topps is also putting mesh seats into soccer and baseball stadiums.
“When you wow somebody in one venue, they’ve got other venues to bring in your stuff,” said 4Topps President and Chief Commercial Officer Deron Nardo.
New business
As more venues, especially in sunny, hot climates, adapt mesh seats and 4Topps’ core business rolls along, it’s preparing to launch a new direct-to-consumer business line in the $24 billion outdoor furniture market. It features five mesh seating products made from stainless steel and aluminum — a version of an Adirondack chair, a folding chair, folding and non-folding barstools and a dining chair.
4Topps’ positions its chairs as stadium-tough and -tested, ready for consumers’ backyards. Nardo said the company is pursuing licensing agreements with NCAA schools and plans on some of its outdoor furniture line to bear the marks and colors of a to-be-determined handful of college athletic programs. He said it’s close to deals with eight to 10 schools and expects to roll out the product lines midsummer.
“It’s an enormous market,” Nardo said. “If the market size of stadium seating is X, then the [outdoor furniture] market is 10X, 20X.”
When surreptitiously quizzing people about their deck furniture, Nardo has found the most people think they either spent too much and never use it or bought cheap stuff that disintegrated in the elements. The mesh, again, could be the solution the consumer market needed.
And with outdoor furniture’s 6% annual compound annual growth rate, “We don’t need to carve out a lot of the market for this to be a big part of our business,” said Nardo.