A couple of questions you need to answer are the following. What sort of a bean bag do you want. Do you want a leather type of bean bag  or do you want the ones with vinyl covers. Is it important for you to have a removable cover or does that matter at all ?

Are your kids likely to open up the zip and empty out the beans from the beanbag or would they have no interest in that whatsoever. What you need to work out is whether you see kids eating food on the beanbags as well as drinking fizzy drinks. If you are one of those families that eat their dinner in front of the Telly then you are far more likely to have accidents than if you don’t.

If you do plan on eating on the bean bags then you really should consider buying a bean bag with the removable zipped up cover. If you don’t plan on eating on them then it isn’t as big a concern at all. They will suffer far less wear and tear if you are only going to watch TV on them or read on them. The average life expectancy of a fatboy beanbag should be about 5 years or so provide no massive damage is done to it in those 5 years.

Bean Bag companies have really raised the bar in the last few years. You no longer just get a bean bag, you can now get beanbags that come in a variety of different shapes, colours and sizes. As of last count there were 15 different colours of bean bags to choose from in the Fatboy store and this is only likely to increase as time passes.

People often phone up looking for a specific colour and if we don’t have it then we will go out of our way to manufacture that bean bag for them provided that there is a big enough demand. What we are now seeing nowdays are all the universities and colleges jumping on the proverbial bandwagon. It is proving to be a great opportunity for colleges to get their logo or football team logo emblazoned on the beanbags.

The universities are now contacting the bean bag manufaturers directly asking them to do this. Obviously this has to make sense for the bean bag manufacturer as well as they don’t want to go out and make all these bena bags unless someone is going to buy them. Think of it like this over 80,000 people will often attend college football games which is the same number as people who watch NFL matches.

There is a huge following and it goes further than just the people in the college themselves. There are all the past pupils who want a little bit of the college themselves. These same people spend a lot of money on clothes, tracksuits etc with logos on so there is no reason whatsoever why the bean bag market cant grab a slice of the market as well.

So is there any advantage whatsoever to having a beanbag rather than a sofa. Well to be honest I can think of lots. If your kids play a lot of video games and which kids don’t nowadays then a bean bag is far superior to amy video gaming chair on the market. The problem with video gaming chairs is that they are built for one purpose and one purpose alone and that is gaming.

By all accounts gaming chairs are badly designed and cumbersome, they are next to impossible to move around which is a real pain in the ass if you want to move your gaming chair anywhere else in the house. With regards to using gaming chairs for reading and chilling out it is next to impossible to get really comfortable in them. If you want to move it to another room in the house you practically have to disassemble it and then reassemble it when it reaches its ultimate destination.

With a fatboy beanbag you never have this problem, you just lift it up and move it from A to B or else you can do the famous “Rack them and Stack them”. What this means is that you can stack the bean bags one on top of each other if you do need to clear the space for some other activity. You cant exactly do this with a couch now, can you ?

If you own a slightly bigger house than the average person then you may be fortunate enough to have a room that is specifically a room for kids. The advantage of this is that kids need space as do their parents. This provides you with the perfect opportunity to design a room which is aimed solely at kids and not adults.

One of the best ways of doing this is to put down a whole bunch of bean bags or bean bag chairs in the room. This is probably one of the most unique kind of decors you could imagine which very few other people would have thought of. Think for a moment of all the games that you can play in a kids room. The most popular games out there are
pool, air hockey , video games etc.

Now these games do require a fair bit of room as well but your kids will also need room when they are relaxing doing other things as well.  The layout I would envisage is having bean bags instead of sofas, tables and chairs. Kids would also much prefer this as well. Price wise it makes way more sense to get a bunch of bean bags rather than an expensive 3 seater sofa and a 2 seater sofa or armchair.

Kids will also appreciate bean bags far more than any sofa. Sofas are perceived as being adult furniture and all kids ever think of when they hear about sofas is the fact that their parents are going to give out to them, telling them to take their shoes off and not to put their feet up on the couch.

As I was approaching them I could see a look of intense frustration spreading across their face as I was carrying nothing at all. They were still expecting me to be carrying around a pink bean bag. So before they could say anything to me at all I told them that I had found a pink beanbag but wouldn’t be able to get my hands on it for another few days. Initially I thought “Madame” wanted to see it which would have proved tricky.

However all the shopping had gotten the better of her and she just wanted to get home and start on the bedroom with everything else that had been spent on the credit card. So 4 days later we were all sitting at home putting the finishing touches onto “Madames” bedroom when the bell went off downstairs and a man was standing at the door holding this huge box with the word “Fatboy” written on it. “Madame” was ecstatic not least because “Fatboy” was the trendy brand name for a bean bag that you had to own.

Here friends would now be extremely envious of her new bedroom and the 1 item of furniture that was the centrepiece of the room, the pink beanbag.

She said that we should meet up again in a couple of hours after I had done a comprehensive search in the shopping centre for the elusive pink bean bag. After much wandering amongst the million and one other people who were doing the XMAS shopping he sat down to have a coffee. As his eyes wandered across the vast shopping centre he did spy a child sitting on a blue bean bag in Mamas And Papas.

So off he went when he finished his coffee to find out where he could buy this blue beanbag. Well in actual fact he wanted the pink beanbag but kind of guessed that if the shop had managed to buy a blue bean bag then they should sell pink bean bags as well. Dad thought that he would be in the good books if he could buy the bean bag and keep the 2 girls happy, he could then get back to his rugby and everything would be fine and dandy.

Upon approaching the sales assistant she informed him that they had spent ages looking for a blue beanbag to complement the shops colour scheme but couldn’t find one anywhere. It was only a bright sparks idea to hop online and try and find a place where they could get it from.

There was also tons of girlie posters on the wall with signed autographs from the celebrities as well as funky designs everywhere. So when “Madame” heard all this she approached her mother first to tell her about the wonderful pink bean bag as well as the total design of the room. “Madames” father never stood a chance as when a teenager and her Mother get together it is a serious case of being ganged up on.

A few weeks later the whole family was unceremoniously dragged through the shops in Dundrum Shopping Center to look for the infamous pink bean bag as well as the bedspreads and new bed. To be honest it was just as well that Dad had recently just got a Christmas bonus as he would have been totally out of pocket.
This was Dad’s idea of hell, being dragged through a shopping centre when he could have been watching a Heineken rugby match on his own brown bean bag at home. Since Dad was making a nuisance of himself and standing in the corner texting his rugby friends, the better half eventually had enough and dispatched him off to a shop to try and find the infamous shockingly coloured pink beanbag.

As I had pointed out to the “War Office” (that’s the wife by the way) even if I did manage to find a bean bag I wouldn’t be able to fit it in the car. The car would be full of “Madames” shopping for her bedroom so the best I could do would be to come back and pick it up at a later date provided I could fine one.

Picture this. It is a scenario playing out all over the country and it may only be a case of time before it happens in your house. So you have a bunch of kids in the family but the one who is causing the most disruption is your teenage daughter who is going through those famous growing pains. She is constantly nagging you about her bedroom.

She has had the same old room for the last five years and now just wants something completely different. Everything was fine until about 2 weeks ago when “Madame” was over in Justine’s house for a 14^th birthday party. All of her school friends were there as well and they were chatting about that one topic that all parents despair of. Boys.

Once all the girls had done a thorough character assassination of very boy in their class and discussing who was hot and who was not they decided to move on to talk about celebrities. Now teenage girls as we all know are really influenced by popstars, (like the Jonas Brothers) and tv stars (especially ones that are in their teens like Hannah Montana, Jamie Lynn Spears and Miranda Cosgrove). Everything that these celebrities do is scrutinised to the smallest detail possible and nothing is left out.

It was actually one of these discussions that started the whole temper tantrums off with regards to resdesigning the bedroom. Justine had asked all the girls at the party to come upstairs and check out her new bedroom that her parents had redesigned for her on the back of Hannah Montana’s bedroom. The centrepiece was a pink bean bag that could fit two adults on without a bother.

Bean bags have provided manufacturers with big opportunities and not all of them are good. It is a niche market but in the last couple of years we have seen poor imitations flooding in from the far east. Many people will contact us to tell us that they bought a competitors bean bag only to see it fall apart in weeks, and they spent quite a bit of money on it.

Make sure you find out where the bean bags are made and that they are stitched together in the correct manner. One place you should be careful of is those market stalls where you can pick them up for a song. You tend to get what you pay for.

Many of the top end manufacturers wont compromise on quality and for that reason their prices may seem to be a little bit higher than other bean bags that you may have stumbled across. There has been an upside to all this flooding of the market. It has provided opportunities to some companies to create bean bag sofas as well as novelty bean bag furniture which wasn’t around previously.

Some companies now make these bean bag sofa which can fit 6 people on. They are the equivalent of a large sofa you can buy in a shop and are a good deal less in price. You can expect to pay a couple of grand for a sofa suite, a bean bag sofa will set you back less. It really is a bargain in comparison.

A question I am frequently asked by people who are considering buying a bean bag is do fatboy bean bags live up to the hype that they hear about. My answer is an emphatic yes and if you don’t believe me just check out what others are saying on our testimonial page.

Loads of people have written in extolling the virtues of bean bags. Another point to bear in mind is that a really tough market to sell to is a childrens market. If your are primarily selling to kids (via their parents) kids will let you know in a flash if the product isn’t up to scratch. Parents sometimes will let things slide, but kids don’t have the same inhibitions or issues to deal with and are more brutal and honest.

It doesn’t matter at all what you want to use your bean bag for, it wont live up to expectations it will easily surpass them a million times over. When you are finished using it and if you want to create more space you can just stick it up against the wall or in a cupboard. Chances are you may not want to do anything at all with it and are happy just to leave it on the floor, which is what most people do.

If you do want your bean bag to be the center of attention in your sitting room don’t be surprised when friends are in your house and say to you “I have looked all over town for bean bags and couldnt find any furniture shop that stocked the fatboy bean bag” To which you reply, the best place to get it is on the net as you just pick choose and pay and get it shipped to your front door for free. You don’t have to worry about fitting into the boot of your car. When it arrives you just unpack it and you are good to go.