The origin story is simple enough to fit on the back of a brochure.
“We wondered if the world would beat a path to our door if we made a better restaurant booth. It did.”
That sentence has anchored the Sims brand for forty-eight years. It came out of a moment in 1977 when the founder rented a warehouse in Locust Grove, Georgia, about forty minutes south of downtown Atlanta, and continued a family tradition of building restaurant furniture that put quality before convenience.
The bet was straightforward. If the booth was demonstrably better, better frame, better upholstery, better service, customers would notice. The bet paid off. Booths went out of Locust Grove and into restaurants and facilities from New York to Florida. Distributors started asking for Sims by name. Repeat business started showing up from customers who had bought a single booth a decade earlier and wanted twenty more like it for a new location.
What didn’t change
The company has expanded production over the decades to meet demand. New equipment, new techniques, more capacity. What hasn’t moved is the philosophy:
- Build to the highest possible 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.
- Move orders through production without delay. A restaurant doesn’t open until the seating arrives. We schedule and ship around the project’s milestones, not ours.
- Keep the relationship personal. When something goes wrong, a damaged piece, a sourcing issue, a custom alteration that needs a second pass, the customer gets someone who can make it right.
Why we still take this seriously
It would be easier, financially, to chase the lower end of the market. Cheaper materials, faster cycle times, a brochure that promises more than the product delivers. We don’t, because that’s not the business this company was set up to run.
The booth on a Sims spec sheet today is built to the same discipline as the booth that came out of that first warehouse in 1977, and it’s expected to last just as long.
That’s the part of the story that doesn’t fit on a brochure.
Published by The Sims Family. Last updated December 11, 2025.
