Custom Ski Chairs in Team Colors for Game Day Tailgates
It is 7:40 on a Saturday morning in a gravel lot, somebody’s speaker is playing the same six songs it played last year, and a guy two spaces over is fighting a camp chair that folded itself around his forearm. He wins eventually. The chair does not fully recover. That is game day seating in one picture, and it is the reason we get calls every September about custom ski chairs in team colors.
Nobody plans their tailgate seating until it fails
Ask anybody how they ended up with the chairs they have and the story is the same. Somebody bought four folding chairs at a big box store in 2019 for eleven dollars each. Two of them are gone. One has a broken armrest that everybody knows about and warns guests about. The fourth is fine but the cup holder tore out, so it holds a can the way a pocket with a hole holds keys.
Meanwhile the tailgate itself got a lot more serious. The grill got better. Somebody brought a real table. There is a griddle now, and a canopy, and a guy who takes the food genuinely seriously and gets there at six in the morning. The seating is the last part of the setup that anybody upgrades, and it is the part everybody uses for five straight hours.
Here is the honest version, and it is not a sales pitch. If you are hauling seating in and out of a stadium lot twelve times a season, buy good folding chairs and accept that they are consumable. Nothing we build folds. A ski Adirondack is 45 inches tall by 36 deep by 32 wide and it is not going in a trunk with the cooler.
But most game days are not stadium lot game days. Most of them happen in a driveway, on a patio, in a garage with the door up and a television on a rolling cart. That is where the real chair earns its spot, and that is where a folding chair has been quietly ruining the afternoon for years.
The honest math on portable game day seating
Folding chairs are light, they are cheap, and they collapse into a bag. That is the whole case for them and it is a real case. The cost is comfort after hour two, a seat height that puts most adults in a slouch, and a lifespan that runs about two seasons if the chair spends its offseason in a garage and about one if it lives in a truck bed.
Camping chairs are the upgrade most people make next. Better frames, sometimes a recliner function, occasionally a cooler pouch. They are heavier, they cost three or four times as much, and they last longer. They are the right answer if the seating has to travel every single week.
Stadium seats and stools solve different problems. A stool is great for the person working the grill who is only sitting in ten minute increments. A stadium seat is for bleachers, which is a real need but not a tailgate need. Both are fine. Neither is where anybody wants to spend four hours.
Inflatable seating is the one we would gently steer you away from. It is fun for about forty minutes and then somebody sets a hot plate down or drags it across gravel, and now you have a slow leak and a person sinking imperceptibly through the second quarter. It is funny once.
So the question is not which portable chair is best. The question is how many of your game days actually require portability. For most people the answer is two or three a year, and the other fifteen happen at home.
The driveway tailgate is the one you host most
Count the game days you host at your own place. Season opener, the noon kickoff nobody wants to travel for, the rivalry game with fourteen people, the playoff run in January when it is 28 degrees and everybody stands around a fire pit anyway. That is the majority of the season, and none of it requires a chair that folds.
What it requires is a chair somebody can sit in for five hours without shifting, that holds a can where a can belongs, and that will still be out there in April. That is what an Adirondack ski chair is. Douglas Fir base, retired skis for the back and seat, 400 lb capacity, and a ski binding for a cup holder, which sounds like a gimmick until the first time a full beer survives somebody standing up fast on a third down conversion.
The Blue/Grey Stained Ski Chairs are the version built for exactly this, because you pick the ski colors. Starting at $595, on a blue and gray stained base, with the skis in whatever two colors your Saturdays revolve around. They measure 45 inches tall by 36 deep and 32 wide with the binding cup holders, and they are comfortable for people from three feet tall to six foot ten, which covers your entire guest list including the nephew and the guy from work who played offensive line.
Is a real chair overkill for a driveway? Maybe. So is the griddle. Nobody has ever complained about the griddle.
What goes into a chair that survives a crowd
One Adirondack ski chair takes four to five pairs of retired skis. A set of two takes eight to ten pairs. That is a real pile of gear, sourced from shops, swaps and garages across Colorado, and it is why no two chairs come out identical. The topsheets still show their graphics. Somebody skied those.
The base is Douglas Fir, chosen because it is stable, strong and it takes paint and stain properly. Everything gets exterior oil paint, which is weatherproof and hard wearing, and which matters more at a tailgate than it does on a patio. Barbecue smoke, spilled soda, ketchup, a dropped brat, somebody’s boot on the armrest. It wipes.
If your crowd runs bigger, we build the same chair in a taller version at 55 inches, and we build sets. We also build a hockey stick chair at $695, which takes twelve to fifteen sticks and is the single most requested piece we make for people whose Saturdays are actually Sundays on the ice. A golf club chair uses one full set of clubs. A snowboard chair needs at least three boards, and a single snowboard makes a bench or a coffee table, which is a genuinely useful thing to put in front of the group.
Every chair carries a 3 year warranty. Yup. That number exists because we got tired of explaining what happens when a chair lives outside in Colorado for a decade, which is mostly that it fades a little and nothing else. Most chairs ship free to the lower 48, so the freight is not a surprise line item at checkout.
Team colors, logos, and the part people get wrong
Color is the easy part and it does most of the work. Two ski colors and a stained base will read as your team from across a yard without a single logo anywhere on the chair. Blue and orange. Maroon and gold. Green and gold. Black and silver. Everybody at the party gets it in half a second, and it still looks like furniture in July when the season is a rumor.
That is worth pausing on. A chair covered in logos is a chair you have to explain to your spouse every spring. A chair in two colors is just a good looking chair that happens to be a certain two colors. Our customers who went the color route are still happy three years later at a rate that is not close.
When a logo is genuinely the point, here is how it works. A logo is never painted. It goes on as a logo decal floated onto a painted background, with aluminum and plastic appliques available as alternatives depending on the look you want. That gets you clean edges and a mark that reads correctly, which hand painting at that scale cannot reliably do. Branded pricing is quoted on a call, because the number depends on the mark, the count and the finish. Call 303.775.7273 and you will get a real answer in about five minutes.
Hand painted murals are a separate option and they are done in exterior oils by an actual person. A stadium skyline, a mountain, a lake, a ridgeline. If you want something that is not in the catalog at all, that is what custom designs is for.
Setting up the space so people actually sit
Most tailgate setups fail at layout, not at gear. Chairs get pushed into a straight line facing the television, everybody stares forward, and nobody talks to anybody who is not directly beside them. A line is how you seat an audience. You are not running an audience.
Put four chairs in a loose arc, wide enough that people can walk through the middle without a chorus of excuse me. Leave the front of the arc open toward the grill or the screen. Two more chairs facing in from the side gives you a shape people naturally fill, and it means the person cooking is still part of the conversation instead of exiled behind a cloud. Leave a lane along one edge for cornhole while you are at it, because somebody is going to start a game in the second quarter whether you planned for it or not. Our Downhill Premium Ski Cornhole Set is $571 and built from retired downhill skis, and there are a few other builds in cornhole board sets if your crowd leans snowboard.
Give the group a surface. This is the most common gap we see. Everybody has chairs and a cooler, and the cooler becomes the table, which means every drink refill involves relocating three plates. A snowboard bench or a low table between two chairs fixes it for good, and it costs a fraction of another round of seating. The bench collection is where most people solve that.
Two small things that make a bigger difference than they should. Get the chairs off the grass and onto a hard surface if you can, because grass makes everything unstable and everybody leans. And put the fire pit far enough out that people are not choosing between the fire and the food. Eight feet feels right. Six is not enough.
September to January, and what the weather does
Football season runs straight through the part of the year that destroys cheap outdoor furniture. Warm in September, wet in October, freezing by December, snow on the ground for the playoffs. Anything with foam padding and polyester is going to look rough by the end of it, and anything with a steel tube frame is going to have rust at every crimp.
Exterior oil paint over Douglas Fir handles that season without any intervention from you. Leave the chairs out. Snow on them is fine. Rain is fine. They are built for a Colorado patio year round, and a football season is a mild version of what they normally live through.
The one thing worth doing is a wipe down after the big cook days. Grease that sits on any finish through a winter will leave a shadow, and thirty seconds with a damp cloth prevents it entirely. Do not reach for a solvent cleaner or an oil spray. The finish does not want them and does not need them.
Sun is the only slow enemy, and it works over years, not months. A chair in full high altitude sun every day will soften in color eventually. Under a covered patio it will look new for a very long time. Either way, if something actually goes wrong we are on the hook inside the 3 year warranty, and after that we charge cost on materials for repairs. We would rather fix a chair than sell you a replacement.
Buying one for the person who never misses a game
This is a gift category, and a strong one, because it solves the problem of buying for somebody who already owns everything they want. The season ticket holder. The guy who has hosted every opener for nine years. The retiree who now watches four games on a Saturday and has opinions about all of them.
A chair in their colors is specific in a way that a gift card is not. It says somebody paid attention. And it does not require you to guess their taste in furniture, because the whole point is that it is their team, not your design instinct. Nobody has ever opened one of these and had to perform enthusiasm.
Timing is where gifts go wrong. Made to order pieces run two to four weeks, and September is our busiest stretch for exactly this reason. If you want a chair in somebody’s hands before the season opener, start in early August. If you are already late, check the ready to ship pieces first, because those are finished and go out immediately.
For a smaller gift that still lands, a set of party skis with drink bindings is the thing that gets pulled out at every single tailgate afterward and is guaranteed to end up in photographs. The 2-Boot ShotzSkis are $169, which is less than most people spend on a cooler they use twice. There is more in gift items if you want options at a few different price points.
How ordering works before the season starts
Most pieces are made to order and take two to four weeks. Some are finished and sitting in the shop ready to go. If you have a date, tell us the date in your first message, because that single piece of information decides whether we can help you or not.
Most chairs ship free to the lower 48. We deliver locally across Colorado ourselves, which is the better option for a set of four or more, and we ship nationwide the rest of the time. Chairs arrive assembled or nearly so, so nobody is losing a Saturday to a hex key and a bad diagram.
If you want a rocker instead of a fixed base, that conversion is $75 and it runs on repurposed oak wine barrel slats. On a game day chair we think it is worth it, because people rock when they are nervous and there is a lot of nervous in a fourth quarter. The same reclaimed oak whiskey and wine barrel staves go into our barrel chairs if you want that look without skis.
We are a small shop in Manitou Springs, Colorado, and the person who picks up the phone has usually worked on the piece you are calling about. Buy straight off the site if you know what you want. For colors, a logo or a set, call. Five minutes on the phone beats two days of email every time. Browse the full chair collection to see what is in the shop now.
How many chairs your setup actually needs
People buy seating the way they buy paper plates, which is to say they buy for the biggest crowd they have ever had. That is how you end up with nine chairs and a garage that no longer holds a car. The number you want is the number of people who sit for the whole game, not the number of people who walk through the door.
In practice that is four to six for most home setups. The crowd swells at kickoff and again at halftime, but the core group that parks itself and stays is smaller than the guest list, and everybody else is standing near the food regardless. Buy for the core. Add a bench for the overflow and you have covered the rest.
That is why sets of two make more sense than they appear to on paper. Two chairs with a bench between them seats four comfortably, gives everybody a surface for a plate, and costs less than four chairs. A set of two Adirondack ski chairs takes eight to ten pairs of retired skis, so you are also keeping a real amount of gear out of a dumpster. That matters to some of our customers quite a lot, and to others not at all, which is fine.
If you host the big one every year, the rivalry game or the playoff Sunday, look at a full set rather than adding chairs one at a time over four seasons. A table with a snowboard runner and matching seating handles a crowd better than a ring of mismatched chairs, and it does not look like it was assembled during an emergency. The patio sets are where those live.
One last piece of practical advice that costs nothing. Put the taller 55 inch chairs in the back row and the standard 45 inch chairs up front. Nobody thinks about sightlines until the second half, when three people are watching the game through the gap between two heads. Stagger the heights and the problem never comes up.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you build a chair in any two team colors?
Yes. You pick the ski colors and we stain or paint the base to work with them, so the chair reads as your team without any logo on it. Color matching is part of a custom build rather than an extra charge.
Are these chairs portable enough for a stadium parking lot?
No, and we would rather say so. An Adirondack ski chair is 45 inches tall by 36 deep by 32 wide and weighs what a real wooden chair weighs, so it belongs in a driveway, on a patio or in a garage setup rather than in a trunk every week.
How many skis go into one chair?
One Adirondack ski chair takes four to five pairs of retired skis, and a set of two takes eight to ten pairs. That is why every chair looks a little different and why the topsheet graphics never repeat exactly.
Can you put a team logo on the chair?
A logo is never painted on. It goes on as a logo decal floated onto a painted background, with aluminum and plastic appliques as alternatives, and branded pricing is quoted on a call at 303.775.7273 because it depends on the mark and the quantity.
How long before the season should I order?
Made to order pieces run two to four weeks, so early August is comfortable for a season opener and September gets tight. Ready to ship pieces are already finished and go out right away if you are working against a short deadline.
If your driveway setup is still running on chairs you bought during a different presidency, this is the year to fix it. Start with the Blue/Grey Stained Ski Chairs and pick your two colors, or call 303.775.7273 and we will work out sizes, a set count and timing before kickoff. The rest of the lineup is in the chair collection whenever you want to look around.
