Whether you’re selecting furniture for shared spaces like dorms, camps, or hostels or you simply want something sturdy and long-lasting of your home, you might be interested in the prospect of purchasing commercial grade furniture. What makes it different from consumer products, and what can you hope to gain by upgrading to commercial grade? Here’s what you need to know before you buy.
What Characterizes Commercial Grade Furniture?
As you may expect, commercial grade furniture assumes a higher degree of wear and tear that the average consumer furniture might undergo in a home setting. For this reason, commercial grade furniture must meet higher standards for strength and durability. It must feature sturdy construction, heavy-duty materials, and features that add resilience.
How are these differences measured? Like any type of industry, standards are decided upon by a dedicated ruling body. These bodies tend to be under the umbrella of government organization, or alternately, industry groups committed to consumer protections. In the case of commercial grade furniture, that body is BIFMA.
What is BIFMA?
The Business + Institutional Furniture Manufacturers Association (BIFMA) is a non-profit trade organization that has been around since 1973. Their purpose is to develop, set, and enforce standards for the manufacturing of commercial grade furniture. BIFMA concerns itself not only with developing standards for safety and durability, but also environmental sustainability. All of this is designed to ensure that products meet minimum standards, as well as encourage manufacturers to improve the quality of their products.
BIFMA Standards
When it comes to ensuring that customers get the best quality products, BIFMA works diligently to set standards for comfort, safety, and durability of commercial grade furniture, ensuring that business customers get their money’s worth. In order to do this, BIFMA not only sets performance and safety standards for different types of commercial furnishings, from office seating and storage solutions to commercial grade metal bunk beds, but it also observes both domestic and international standards for furniture compliance.
As an accredited member of ANSI, or the American National Standards Institute, BIFMA must follow essential requirements when it comes to standards development protocol, ensuring fair and comprehensive measures for assessing commercial grade furniture. This is both to the benefit of manufacturers and the customers that purchase their commercial grade products.
Commercial Grade Furniture for Commercial Use
When it comes to purchasing commercial grade furniture like metal bunk beds for dorms, camps, hostels, or other settings that feature sleeping quarters for guests, there are a few things that businesses value above all else: comfort, safety, and durability. The right metal bunk beds, including those that conform to BIFMA standards, can meet all of these requirements.
When you purchase metal bunk beds from a trusted supplier like ESS Universal, you’ll get sturdy construction that provides ample comfort and support for adult guests, accommodating up to 500 pounds of weight. Unlike wooden options, these products are lightweight and resistant to water, fading from UV rays, pests (like bed bugs), and vandalism by campers or dorm residents.
They’re also more compact, allowing for more beds in a given sleeping space. For businesses seeking commercial grade furniture for dorms, camps, hostels, and more, metal bunk beds offer the greatest benefits.
ESS Universal manufactures and supplies high-quality, cost-effective commercial grade furniture products. View our entire line of commercial furniture products including our popular single metal bed frames, single over single bunk beds, single over double bunk beds, and triple bunk beds.
