How many spare parts to order with your chairs

Venues that buy 300 chairs will replace parts on 30 to 60 of them inside two years. Packing those parts into the same container costs almost nothing. Shipping them eighteen months later costs more than the part.

Published by JPChairs · Chair manufacturer in Foshan, China · 2026-10-17

What actually fails, in order of frequency

Field requests cluster on four parts. Everything else is rare enough that holding stock for it wastes shelf space.

• Glides and feet: 55 to 65 per cent of all spare requests. Nylon inserts wear through in 6 to 18 months on hard floors; felt pads compress flat in 3 to 6 months.
• Bolts, nuts, washers: 15 to 20 per cent. M6 or M8 frame bolts work loose under stacking cycles; a nyloc nut costs cents and prevents the call-out.
• Stack buttons and bumper pads: 10 to 15 per cent on stacking frames, usually crushed or lost within the first 100 stack cycles.
• Upholstery: 8 to 12 per cent. Almost always a seam split or a torn seam allowance, rarely the middle of a panel.
• Structural failures: under 2 per cent, and nearly always traceable to one abuse event rather than fatigue.

How much to order per 100 chairs

The quantities below assume a busy restaurant running two sittings a day. Hotels that store banquet seating on trolleys can halve the glide count; a terrace should double it.

• 40 to 60 glides, a full set for every five chairs. Measure the shank with calipers before ordering: 16 mm, 18 mm and 22 mm are the most common and they are not interchangeable.
• 8 complete bolt sets, one set being every fastener on one chair, so a chair can be rebuilt from bare frame.
• 20 stack buttons and 20 felt bumper pads.
• 1 can of touch-up finish. 200 ml covers 30 to 40 touch points, ordered from the same finish batch as the frames.
• 5 to 8 running metres of upholstery fabric, dye lot tagged, enough for about six seat covers.
• 2 complete chairs held back per model above 150 units, kept as donor units.

Why shipping them later costs twenty times more

The part is cheap. Getting one to you is not.

• In your own container: effectively free. Two cartons is about 0.05 cbm against a roughly 67 cbm usable load in a 40ft box.
• A 1 kg courier parcel: USD 45 to 90, with 4 to 7 days transit. That is one glide and four bolts flown.
• LCL consolidation: USD 180 to 350 in handling fees before freight, plus 25 to 40 days of transit and documentation.
• Downtime dwarfs both. One chair out of service in a 120-seat room costs about a cover a night: at USD 28 average spend, three weeks waiting for a part is roughly USD 500 of lost revenue for a USD 0.40 glide.

Photos, batch numbers and the 48-hour claim

Most claims drag on for months because the part cannot be identified. Four habits fix that.

• Photograph defects within 48 hours of unstuffing the container. Claims filed after 30 days are close to impossible to settle fairly.
• Send three photos: the whole chair, the part close-up at about 30 cm, and the carton label showing the batch number.
• Keep the production batch number on file. It links back to the finish batch card, the fabric dye lot and the inspection record in one step.
• Know what is covered. Structural parts are free for 24 months from the B/L date; consumables such as glides are sold at cost, usually USD 0.30 to 1.20 each.

Repair on site, or replace the chair

One simple threshold keeps maintenance decisions from turning into arguments: repair anything that can be fixed in under 15 minutes, replace anything that cannot.

• Under 15 minutes, do it in house: glides, bolts, stack buttons, a stapled seat panel. A cordless driver and a torque setting of 4 to 6 Nm covers almost all of them.
• Send out: seam splits needing a sewing machine, re-upholstery of more than two panels, and any frame that has lost its square by more than 3 mm across the diagonals.
• Local upholsterer economics: recovering a seat runs USD 45 to 90 including labour, against USD 120 to 220 for a new chair landed. Re-covering pays until the frame itself is loose.
• Measure the fleet at 24 months. If more than 12 per cent of chairs need structural work, the specification was wrong for the traffic, and the next order should change frame or grade rather than be repeated.

Storing spares so they are usable in year three

Spares degrade faster in bad storage than in service.

• Below 60 per cent relative humidity and out of direct sun. Felt pads and stacked foam compress permanently above about 40 degrees C.
• Label by model code and order date, not by description: two very similar frames can take different bolt lengths.
• Re-order before stock drops below 20 per cent, because fresh fabric means a new dye lot, a 300 to 500 m minimum and 15 to 25 days of mill lead time.
• Review the ratio after 12 months. Twelve months of real consumption beats any numbers a supplier can estimate for you.

Wear parts for the metal frame chairs are stocked to the sizes above, and the restock process is described on the spare parts FAQ.