For colleges & universities
Six-fifteen in the morning, and the quad still smells like cut grass and last night's sprinklers. A facilities crew and a dozen student workers are wheeling out row after row of white folding chairs — cart by cart, chair by chair — for the ceremony that starts at ten and cannot be rescheduled. By nine, three thousand of them will be sitting exactly where someone put them. By two that afternoon, every single one will be stacked, carted, and gone.
You don't buy furniture for one Saturday morning in May. You buy it for that Saturday, plus orientation, plus the fall career fair, plus the home-opener tailgate, plus the donor reception. Chivari has designed and engineered event furniture in the USA since 2007 — family-owned, built for a campus that doesn't get a weekend to recover between events.
A wide-stance base rated to sit on grass, sand, and everything in between a quad throws at a chair over four years — not just an indoor chair pressed into outdoor service for one afternoon.
Folding chairs, banquet tables, carts, stages, and dance floors — on one purchase order, from one manufacturer. See the folding chairs and Chiavari lines side by side.
A team that's used to quote requests that have to survive a procurement committee, not just a shopping cart. Ask about the free sample chair program before a fleet order goes out to bid.
Outdoor mass seating
In 2022, Harvard held its first full commencement since the pandemic — one ceremony, more than 30,000 seats, on grass. The university still ran short of chairs, badly enough that the shortfall became its own headline. (The Harvard Crimson) That's not a Harvard problem — it's what happens anywhere "how many chairs do we own" collides with "how many people are we hosting outdoors, on one specific Saturday, with no do-over."
Standard folding-chair feet are built for a floor, not a lawn — four small points concentrate a person's full weight into four small circles of turf. Chivari's Grass & Sand line is built around a wider base specifically for soft ground: rated to 660 lbs, stacks, and arrives fully assembled — no bracket kit, nothing a student crew has to figure out an hour before doors open.
660 lb rated · fully assembled · stacks — the lead chair for any seating set directly on grass or sand.
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The padded step-up: 850 lb rated, vinyl cushion, stainless hardware.
Shop Now ▸One honest note before you spec the padded version into a multi-campus bid: it currently ships as a regional line, not a nationwide catalog guarantee — confirm availability with a Chivari specialist before you promise it across every campus in a system. And if your ceremony runs into the thousands of seats, it's worth one call to your own campus safety office about aisle widths and accessible seating blocks before you finalize the layout.
Move the fleet, not just the furniture
A hotel banquet department turns a room with the same six people every night. A campus doesn't work that way — the crew that sets three thousand chairs for commencement in May is not the crew that struck them for Welcome Week in August. It's a rotating roster of student workers, some doing this for the first time, on a shift that started before their first class. Order the carts with the chairs, not after them — one freight consolidation instead of two, and the labor saving shows up on the very first move.
Chair Carts & Dollies. Hold up to 63 folding chairs — light enough that a student worker can push it across a parking lot alone. All-terrain wheels and a flip-down lift bar handle the same uneven ground the chairs sit on. Shop Carts ▸
American Cart Mantis Hand Truck. For chairs that arrive by the pallet, not the rack: 800 lbs on four flat-free wheels built specifically to be chair-pallet compatible. Flat-free means it isn't the cart that goes down for repair the one week a year everything else is already stretched thin. Shop the Mantis ▸
A cart is not an accessory. It's the difference between three thousand chairs and three thousand individual trips across a parking lot.
The tool that turns fleet math into a Tuesday-morning job three student workers can actually finish before the ceremony starts.Orientation, career fairs & registration
A campus doesn't buy a table for one job — the same order gets requisitioned by facilities and split across three departments who each have their own use for it, which is exactly why the table that does double duty is the one that actually gets reordered. The 60" round seats eight to ten adults at 36.5 lbs, light enough for two people to flip and store without a cart. The 72" x 18" seminar table is rated to 600 lbs and built for training rows and registration lines — a space-efficient work surface, not a banquet table pressed into a job it wasn't built for.
Seats 8–10 adults · Steel Skeleton frame · 36.5 lb — two people can flip and store it without a cart.
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600 lb rated · built for training rows, classroom layouts, and narrow staging zones.
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Keeps a plywood or steel-skeleton leg from punching through the lawn.
Shop Now ▸If either table is heading outside — a registration table during Welcome Week, a check-in table at an outdoor career fair — the Anti-Sink Table Feet solve the same soft-ground problem as the Grass & Sand chairs, for a fraction of the footprint.
Student union & ballroom
Every campus has one room that can't decide what it is — a multipurpose space that hosts a guest lecture at noon and a Greek formal or a scholarship gala at eight. That room runs on Chiavari and banquet-style chairs the same way a hotel ballroom does: a chair that folds flat for storage between bookings but still photographs like a formal event when it's set. This isn't the lead story for a campus the way it is for a hotel — most of a university's furniture spend happens outdoors, by the thousand, not indoors, by the hundred. But for the student union, the donor reception, and the occasional black-tie Greek formal, the Chiavari chairs collection ▸ covers the same ground a hospitality ballroom does, in the finishes a formal event actually calls for.
The platform, not the podium
Somewhere at the front of the quad is a stage nobody in the audience thinks about until the provost walks across it. The Titan 8' x 12' Ceremonial Portable Stage ▸ is a plywood deck under an industrial-grip laminate surface, edged in anodized aluminum, on steel legs, standing 21 inches high. Rounded corners aren't a styling choice on a stage where a procession of gowns has to cross it in one direction and exit in another without anyone catching a heel.
Ask a Chivari specialist for the current load-capacity rating before you finalize a layout for a full processional line. What we can say without hedging: it's built to be assembled and struck by a facilities crew, not a stagehand union, and it ships ready for the skirting and railing that turn a platform into a stage.
Greek life, galas & homecoming
This is a smaller line item on a campus than at a hotel — most of a university's event calendar doesn't need a dance floor. But the ones that do (Greek formals, alumni and donor galas, homecoming) tend to book the same floor year after year. The 16' x 16' White Dance Floor with Gold Edge ▸ is a common starting size for a ballroom-scale gala — interlocking HPL panels, UV-resistant finish, built to be assembled and taken back apart by the same student-affairs crew handling everything else on this page.
Where to start
Match the space to the piece, and the rest of a fleet order gets a lot easier to sequence.
Outdoor quad
Wide base for soft ground, 660 lb rated, stacks, arrives fully assembled — the lead chair for any seating set directly on grass.
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Storage & fleet management
Holds seven chairs at 500 lbs, weighs 30 lbs itself — sized for a student worker to move alone, not a professional crew.
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Orientation & career fairs
Built for training rows and registration lines — 600 lb rated, sized for a floor that has to turn over fast.
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Student union & ballroom
The formal-event finish for the one room on campus that has to double as a lecture hall and a gala space.
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Commencement platform
Rounded corners built for a processional line, not a concert — the platform sized and named for the job.
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September 18, 2026
Six-fifteen in the morning, and the quad still smells like cut grass. A facilities crew wheels folding chairs off a cart in rows, for a ceremony that starts at ten and cannot start at ten-fifteen. Nobody in those chairs will...
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