Archive for the ‘party tents’ Category

Party Tents or Marquees

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

What’s the difference between party tents and marquees?

In a word, nothing. Well that was a short blog..

One of our customers met a rival recently who tried to tell him he wasn’t hiring marquees he was hiring party tents in what was obviously meant as an insult. This leads to two points of discussion:

1. When you meet a competitor there’s generally one of two reactions – either comraderie (we’re both in the same game) or one upmanship (we’re faster than you, our marquees are bigger than yours, our van’s shinier than your van..)

2. Is calling a commercial grade marquee a party tent an insult? Not really, most of the rest of the world don’t use the term ‘marquee’ they refer to all structures as party tents including ones 30m wide. The only countries that regularly use the term ‘marquee’ are the UK, Ireland, Australia and NZ to my knowledge.

You imagine that the rival in question above uses the over-engineered aluminium frame marquees for his 6m, so what’s your response?

You could try explaining the business sense of using our marquees, you could ask him as he pays over the odds for his 6m marquees does he also use a diamond-encrusted hammer to do his matting? Personally I wouldn’t do either, what’s the point in educating him? All he’s then going to do is copy you and buy our marquees -let him use the more expensive ones while you have the higher return on investment.

Thanks for reading

Spencer

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Buy a marquee for 99p!

Monday, May 11th, 2009

Well okay, it probably won’t stay at 99p but someone should pick up a bargain.

We’ve made a batch of 4mx6m Marquees for a customer and obviously when manufacturing you make more than required so we have a few spare. As an experiment we’ve put one of them on eBay starting at 99p with no reserve. Details are here:

4m x 6m DIY Marquee on eBay

It’s made using the same materials as our commercial 6m wide range, we’ve changed the angle of the roof though so it’s 3m high at the apex. There’s 2 reasons for this:

1. We were concerned that if we left it as the industry standard of 20 degrees like our 6m wide marquees then there wouldn’t be enough room for chandeliers etc and
2. It’s cheaper to make it so all 3 knuckles (eaves and apex) are the same! This is actually why some of our cheaper rivals have higher roofs than standard.

We can always make linings for it if required.
Happy bidding

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Party tents use powder coating, commercial marquees are galvanised

Monday, January 5th, 2009

I’m often asked why we don’t powder coat our marquee framework so here’s why:

When I suffered my back injury and realised I had to go into marquee sales rather than marquee hire I started to do some research. Basically I picked the brains of mates in the industry, various contacts and searched round for what the current options were.

The boundaries are getting greyer and greyer but people clearly differentiated between ‘party tents’ and ‘commercial marquees’.

By general opinion party tents were made from thin PE material, were a budget option and had….powder coated framework.

Commercial marquees were always seen to have PVC covers, be more durable and long lasting and always used..galvanised metal framework.

Visiting a friends marquee hire business really made up our minds -he had a mixture of powder-coated and non-coated framework and after just one season the powder-coating was scratched and chipped. The galvanising looked better simply because it still had a uniform finish. As he said if people want a marque for anything other than a cover out of the elements then they’ll use an interior lining anyway.

I think most people would think a powder coated framework is superior when brand new. But our marquees are built to last a long time and after a few uses when that powder coating becomes scratched and peeling nearly everyone would agree galvanising’s a better option.

That’s why we use galvanising.

Thanks for reading

Spencer.

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