Page 13 - Parks and Recreation

When you sell park picnic tables, park benches, bicycle racks, aluminum bleachers and commercial trash cans to a niche market of site facility managers it's no easy accomplishment to be included in the distinguished company of Top 500 E-Retailer sites such as Amazon, Wal-Mart, Netflix, Staples, etc.

But The Park Catalog in Boca Raton, Fla. achieved that feat again in 2014 and has maintained this coveted accolade awarded by Internet Retailer Magazine for the past five years in a row.

First, a key element would be the breadth and depth of inventory of commercial site furnishings. Those products include everything from a park bench with a logo, to tip-n-roll bleachers, a park grill, bicycle racks made with recycled plastic and thousands of other hand-picked items.

Park Catalog recognized as Top 500 E-Retailer for Commercial Site Furnishings onlin

The Park Catalog provides commercial site furnishings

Eco-Cycling

You already take your bike to work and around town so how much more eco friendly can you be? Well Mauro Hernandez and Bill Holloway say significantly. They are known for their furniture designs at Masterworks wood and Design; however, they are now making bikes out of "urban lumber". What is urban lumber? It is the decaying trees found in cities as well as the timber salvaged from fences and homes. They are taking the infrastructure created and dismantled by people and using it to make transportation in an incredibly environmentally conscious way. Not only are they using salvaged wood but also they apply the environmentally friendly seals and stains by hand so as not to release pollutants that spraying would. Don't think these bicycles are any more fragile than your normal bike, they are just as solid and able to endure the wear and tear of city travelling.

Some other eco friendly bike alternatives include bicycles made from bamboo, which is a highly sustainable material because

We were very fortunate to be a part of creating a new oasis in form of a new community garden called Frog Alley in Delray Beach, FL just a few blocks from where my family and I attend church at St. Paul's on South Swinton Avenue. It was at St. Paul's that I met Jeannie Fernsworth, a passionate advocate of community gardens and the grown locally movement who never misses an opportunity to share her passion for community gardens and to enlist others in her cause to build more of them in Palm Beach County.

I have been inspired by how many people and organizations came together to create this beautiful garden. The Delray Chamber of Commerce got involved and the Delray Garden Center donated labor and materials. The real champions of the project were Pablo de Real and Ashley Moore. Both worked countless hours, coordinated dozens of volunteers, managed the local permitting process and put their backs into the manual work of constructing planting beds, moving soil and more. Pablo is committed to

David Byrne with custom bike rac

I have admired David Byrne for as long as I can remember.

I was stuck by his unique and creative musical talents as a teenager. I was a child (teenager) of the eighties and there was no one on the musical scene like David Byrne and the Talking Heads. As I grew older, I lost track of Byrne and so many other great musicians, until he emerged as host of a Sunday evening PBS music program which was terrific. Over time I discovered we shared a passion for cycling as a form of transportation and a "vehicle" for exploration.  As fate would have it, we both see the bike rack as an opportunity for artistic expression that in a subtle way makes bicycle commuting a little more fun and cool.  Of all the products we design and sell at The Park Catalog, custom bike racks are by far my favorite and I was inspired by David Byrne's New York City custom bike rack design contest to challenge our designers and myself to conceive of even more creative designs that inspire

Who would think picnic tables could be so exciting? Well we do. One of our favorite experiences as a team at The Park Catalog is getting to hear back from our customers. Sometimes we get a phone call about adjusting a product's color or size and we are happy to help, reassured by the idea that our customers feel confident enough that we can get them exactly what they need. Other times our customers have great feedback about their experiences with our online order cart, helpful staff, comprehensive selection, or high quality picnic tables.

However, the best contact we get from customers is when we get a testimonial, and especially a picture,  of smiling faces from a successful site furnishing installation. A recent installation of elongated expanded metal picnic tables left the entire office, from accounting to sales, feeling that much better about how our products and our service can help a community.

Saleswoman Carrie Georgopoulos recently shared an email testimonial that included

There are few experiences that awaken the soul like visiting the western mountain states.  Everything there is on such a grand and wondrous scale.  I have by no means seen every National Park in America, but I'm glad I can say I was able to cross two off my list this year with my summer excursion to Moab, UT.