Autoquotes seems to be the main software that designers use to setup restaurants. We have hears many times over the years that we should add our products to Autoquotes. We agree. We would love to put our products on Autoquotes and we hope to as soon as we have enough staff and enough time.
We are being inundated with restaurant orders right now and our top priority is providing furniture to our customers. Unfortunately, marketing efforts like adding Richardson Seating to Autoquotes always end up taking a backseat because we are busy putting out fires instead of looking ahead.
Before it was Covid and shutdowns and now it it is shortages and price increases. This is the first time in the history of Richardson Seating that we have had vendors tell us that a product isn't available. We have been having lots of trouble getting in our chrome frames for bar stools and for our diner chairs.
We have been having problems getting other parts too but luckily we had a pretty huge inventory of all of our other parts. We have been able to keep all of our employees working 40 hours by selling the products that we can make. We can do everything except we don't have enough chrome products to sell on Wayfair and Amazon. Once we have a big supply of metal, we will go back to selling products online and doing high volume clients again.
In the meantime we do have diner chairs available and chrome bar stools in limited quantities on our website for sale. We have been able to keep enough fames in stock so that we haven't had to turn down an order yet.
We have been getting our diner chair frames in stock just in time to complete our big orders. We prefer to have 10s of thousands of pieces in stock but right now it is hand to mouth.
Once we have gotten our supply chain kinks worked out and we have a consistent staff and consistent supply of raw materials, we will seriously consider adding ourselves to Autoquotes. We want to make it as easy as possible for restaurant designers to design restaurant and specify our products.
I wonder if the Autoquotes people read my blogpost because it is a few days later and I just got a quote and committed to adding 300 products to Autoquotes. We are very excited to be able to make it easier for our customers to include our items when they are making whole restaurant quotes.