About Us

I hate writing “About Us” pages.

Sure I know why you’re here. You’re about to place an order with us, or call our lovely people to ask a few questions. And you want to know if we are rogues, cads or fraudsters. Who the hell is Chairforce? Why are they pretending to be members of the Airforce? I’ve never heard of them. Perhaps they can convince me that they are legit by reading all the guff on their About Us page.

And most About Us pages are full of the usual preening, self-congratulatory, motherhood statements that make you puke. “You’ve tried the rest, now try the best”; “Mother Teresa has sat on our Chairs”; “We’ve been in business since before the East India Company started seeking Spices in Tahiti in the 17th Century”. You know the deal.

And the photos of the poor staff. Mostly, they look like hostages forced to smile. Tortured by having to wear some execrable nylon polo shirt. We will spare you that. Rest assured, our team are relatively happy and are not chained to their desks. Ask them yourself sometime.

You’ll carefully scrutinize our font, our logos, spelling and photos. Do they look reputable? I see they’ve spelled “Efficiently” wrong — so how good can they really be? Yes, our graphics are a bit cheesy, but we are cheapskates when it comes to stuff like that. We show you what we have, as clearly as we can, then back it up with great prices and a “non-hostage” smile. Otherwise, you’d have to pay more and that would cause us both pain.

So, I am going to be brief and to the point. Militarily efficient. Pay attention.

What we are? A (reasonably) hard working team of Australians who scour the world for the most popular chairs that people want to buy. Comfy chairs. Stylish chairs. Practical chairs. We then buy thousands of them at prices difficult to beat, bring them back to our 6 national locations, and get them out to our tens of thousands of customers as soon as possible for as little as possible. It’s not astrophysics. It requires no academic gowns or MBAs.

What we are NOT? Ok, we are not rogues. There I’ve said it. Nor are we interested in having arguments with customers or suppliers or courier companies. We do not like fuss. We do not sell crap. We do not price products to Maximize Profit, we price them to move fast on a formula that allows us to stay in business, feed our families and seat the multitudes.

We have a simple philosophy that we ask everyone at Chairforce to consider. It’s called the Grandmother Principle. We have to imagine that you — the customer in front of us or on the phone or reading our emails — that you are an old, dear friend of my grandmother. She is a lovely lady. Quite old but very gossipy. If I do something wrong, or any of my team, and she hears about it, she is going to ring my mother, my father, all my aunts and uncles. She is going to exaggerate my faults, she is going to insult my intelligence. In short, next Christmas is going to be hell. I will be forever mortified by the wrongs I did to her ancient friend, no matter how crazy her friend was. And I’ll get a very small slice of her lovely passion-fruit pavlova. Nobody here wants that to happen, so I expect everyone will treat you as if my grandmother will find out — they will be polite, honest, efficient and apologetic if anything goes wrong.

We loathe overhead. Our showrooms are OK, but I’m not sure they would win awards. There are no designer rugs. No marble statues of Alexander the Great. We think click-lock laminate flooring is an unforgivable extravagance. But there are heaps of chairs and tables. You can sit on it, stand on it, sniff it if you want. And best of all you can generally pick up your chairs and tables straight away. We have it all in stock.

Ahhh, I feel I may have strayed somewhat from my original promise to be brief. Sorry.

In short, we are a bit like you. We like friendly people. We carefully look after our pennies. We hate crap quality, and we absolutely loathe fuss.  I guess that’s why we have sold over 500,000 chairs since 2009. That’s a lot of bums on seats. 1,000,000 cheeks.

On that (bum) note, I’ll conclude. But if you see my grandmother, tell her that I love her and I think her passion-fruit pavlova is the best.

Harry Bray
Chairforce

If you find where we’ve spelled efficiency wrong, then we’ll give you $20 off your order.