Producing high-quality furniture for our diverse family of customers is a 55-year tradition at Virco Mfg. Corporation. Over the last half-century, we've become a leading supplier of tables, chairs and storage equipment for offices, convention centers, auditoriums, places of worship, hotels and related settings. We're also the largest manufacturer of educational furniture in the United States. Virco employs over 1,200 people nationwide. Our 560,000 square-foot Torrance, California headquarters features a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility, as does our Conway, Arkansas location, which has over 2,000,000 square feet of operational space. Large distribution centers in Torrance and Conway give Virco excellent shipping access to major coastal ports..From our earliest days, product development has been a key to Virco's growth. Although Virco got started as a local supplier of chairs and desks for Los Angeles-area schools, the addition of folding chairs and folding tables soon helped expand our sales to a broadening customer base. Successive product lines were subsequently introduced, including a variety of upholstered stack chairs, banquet tables and mobile storage equipment. We've also worked with accomplished designers – such as Peter Glass and Richard Holbrook – to develop additional products for contemporary applications. These include the newly released Zuma™ collection, as well as I.Q.® Series items for educational settings; the Lunada®, and-1™ and Ph.D.® seating lines; and the wide-ranging Plateau® Series. Incidentally, our I.Q. education furniture line was honored with a 2002 Best of NeoCon® Gold Award for design excellence at America's most prestigious contract furniture trade show, while our Plateau Library & Technology products received a Best of NeoCon® Silver Award the following year. And most recently, in June of 2004, our all-new Zuma™ family of classroom furniture products earned a coveted Best of NeoCon Editors' Choice Award..Because customer service is our top priority, Virco maintains a nationwide direct sales team and supports a growing dealer network. We also offer a complete spectrum of support services, including product delivery, installation and repair, and computer-assisted layout planning. Our 2002 acquisition of Furniture Focus™ enables us to provide our customers with an expanded range of items from leading manufacturers for school-based applications. What's more, we now offer the comprehensive PlanSCAPE™ service, which helps school administrators efficiently and cost-effectively manage the furniture, fixtures and equipment (FF&E) portion of new construction or renovation project budgets. As a complement to our commitment to operational excellence, new product development and unsurpassed customer service, we at Virco are concerned about the state of our environment. This has led to the enactment of resource recovery policies that have enabled us to recycle over 150,000,000 pounds of materials while earning repeated commendations. Since 1994, we've received a series of honors from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), the United States General Services Administration, and many other organizations. In fact, just last year, Virco was designated as a charter member of the USEPA's WasteWise Hall of Fame. We're delighted to be known as a company whose commitment to quality encompasses both the workplace and the environment.
