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Our Story · Plate No. 00

Forty-eight years of building seating in Locust Grove, Georgia.

Family-owned, family-run, and still working from the same small Georgia town where the company began.

1977

How it began.

The story starts in a rented warehouse in Locust Grove, Georgia, about forty minutes south of downtown Atlanta, just off the interstate. Our founder rented the building, continued a family tradition of furniture-making, and set out with a simple but powerful belief: if it built a better restaurant booth, customers would recognize the difference.

That belief was proven true.

Within a decade, booths and seating solutions out of that workshop were placed in restaurants and facilities from New York to Florida. Distributors started asking for Sims by name. Repeat business started coming from customers who had bought a single booth years earlier and wanted twenty more for a new location.

Production has expanded over the decades: new equipment, new techniques, more capacity. The philosophy hasn’t moved. We’re still small enough to answer the phone directly, and large enough to keep a stadium, a hotel rollout, or a 200-cover restaurant on schedule. Booths leave here every week for dining rooms, hotel lobbies, club lounges, hospitals, military bases, and coffee shops across the eastern half of the country.

Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Sims, founders of Sims Superior Seating
Mr. & Mrs. Sims · Founders Archive
What is inside a Sims booth
Chapter One · Where It Started

The production floor, as it was.

Two craftsmen cutting booth-back patterns at the saw, cut templates hanging on the shop wall behind them
The pattern shop Archive
An upholsterer smoothing cover material over channel padding, the sewing room behind him
Cover work on the bench Archive
A craftsman tacking upholstery onto a curved booth shell with a pneumatic stapler
Tacking a curved shell Archive
Two craftsmen assembling hardwood booth frames on the bench
The frame shop Archive
Charles Sims holding an order clipboard on the Sims shop floor, machinery behind him
Charles Sims · President · On the shop floor
In his own words

We wondered if the world would beat a path to our door if we made a better restaurant booth. It did. And we wondered if we located the plant in our hometown, whether people could find it. They did. And we wondered if we could find the people to help make the business a continuing success. We did.

We manufacture the best booth that could possibly be produced. When an order comes through our shop, it doesn’t sit around. We don’t either. We try to please our customers because we know our business depends on repeat orders.

We are small enough to give you the kind of personal service that you want and need, and large enough to deliver a consistently superior product which we are constantly working to improve.

Charles Sims President · Sims Superior Seating
Chapter Two · Where It Is Now

The team, today.

The crew Photography in progress. The full team, on the floor they work.
The Sims team Today
At the bench
Upholstery · in progress
On the floor
The frame shop · in progress
Inside the Shop · Locust Grove, GA

What you are actually paying for.

Hardwood booth frames on the Sims shop floor, each bay decked with sinuous wire springs over black decking.
01 / 06 · Frame & spring deck The part you never see decides how long the rest lasts. Kiln-dried hardwood at every stress point, sprung with resin-coated staples and corner-blocked. Sinuous-wire decks are tensioned to the span and the duty cycle of your room, not to a standard.
Stacks of cut foam slabs on the Sims shop floor, ready for upholstery.
02 / 06 · Foam Cut for your booth, not pulled from a shelf. Every slab is cut to the piece it is going into and layered over a fiber pad, so the seat holds its shape through a dinner rush instead of flattening into a dish.
A vintage green Handy Button Machine Co. press on the Sims shop floor, used to cover tufting buttons.
03 / 06 · Buttons A cast-iron press from another era, still the best tool for the job. Every button is covered here, in your own material, on a Handy Button press that has outlived the companies that copied it. Your tufting matches your booth exactly, because the buttons come from the same hide.
A diamond-tufted black leather back being drawn over a foam panel on a hardwood frame.
04 / 06 · Tufting Slow on purpose. It is what keeps the pattern true. Diamonds are drawn over the foam and pulled tight one button at a time, by people who do this and nothing else. None of it is automated, and none of it can be.
Close detail of brass nailhead trim running the edge of a black diamond-tufted booth back.
05 / 06 · Trim The detail a designer notices from across the room. Nailhead set by hand along a hand-sewn welt, spaced by eye so the line stays honest around a curve. Cap-strip seams are aligned to read continuous down a long banquette.
A finished L-shaped black diamond-tufted banquette with brass nailhead trim.
06 / 06 · Finished booth Built to outlast the lease it was ordered for. Inspected against your order at every stage, then blanket-wrapped and palletized to your install date. Replacement components stay in stock in case the freight company is less careful than we are.
Operating Philosophy

Three principles, unchanged since 1977.

01

Build to the highest standard.

No plywood at stress points. No corners cut on framing. No shortcuts that shave a few dollars off the build and cost the customer years of service.

02

Move orders through without delay.

A restaurant doesn’t open until the seating arrives. We schedule around the project’s milestones, not ours.

03

Keep relationships personal.

When something needs attention, the customer gets a person on the phone who can actually do something about it, same as it has always worked here.

Work With Us

Send us your floor plan.

Tell us about the project, the room, the timeline, the finish palette. We'll send a written quote and a recommended specification.