Why we no longer sell Gorilla Playsets

In a hurry? Here are the wooden swing sets and vinyl swing sets we still put our name on.

Jump to section:

1. Why We Stopped Selling Gorilla Playsets
2. How We Became a Gorilla Playsets Dealer
3. What Happened to Gorilla Playsets? The Private-Equity Sale
4. Are Gorilla Playsets Still Good Quality?
5. What We Sell Instead of Gorilla Playsets
6. The Bottom Line
7. Frequently Asked Questions

Why We Stopped Selling Gorilla Playsets

Hi everyone, this is Jay — I’m the owner of NJ Swingsets & Playgrounds. We were a dealer for Gorilla Playsets from the day we opened in 2013. In 2025, we parted ways with a supplier we’d worked with for more than 10 years.

Before I get into why, I want to give you some context — a brief history of our relationship with Gorilla Playsets.

How We Became a Gorilla Playsets Dealer

In 2012, I worked for another swing set dealer that sold Playnation swing sets. Playnation, at the time, was the parent company of Gorilla Playsets. Both companies were owned and operated by their original founders.

Coming from a background in tech, I saw that the future of swing set sales was going to combine online sales with a local brick-and-mortar showroom. The dealer I worked for wasn’t interested in building an online presence. Playnation had already created a new brand, Gorilla Playsets, built specifically for online sales.

Seeing the opportunity, I left that job. The next year I opened an online-only store selling Gorilla Playsets. A year after that, in 2014, we opened our physical showroom.

Gorilla Playsets was ahead of the competition on being online-ready, and it had a product nobody else in that market could match. It was positioned to grow its online sales fast, while still being high quality and good-looking.

Their product could be drop-shipped easily to our out-of-state customers, and we could also order truckloads for in-store sale to local customers.

Since 2014, NJ Swingsets & Playgrounds has sold in the many thousands of Gorilla Sets, both online and in person. We credit much of our early growth to a genuinely good partnership with Gorilla over the first 5+ years.

What Happened to Gorilla Playsets? The Private-Equity Sale

The original owners — people I’d met and knew by name — sold the company. Gorilla was a new brand for the group that bought it, and their first real season running it was 2020.

If you were anywhere near this industry in 2020, you know what happened. Everybody was home with kids who had nowhere to go. We couldn’t keep sets in stock. Neither could anybody else.

That’s the number the new owners started from. Every year since has been down from it.

I don’t think they saw that coming. When your first season is the biggest the category has ever had, you build everything around it — the volume, the margins, the forecasts. Then the boom ends, because it was always going to end, and you’re left running a business that has to hit numbers it will never hit again. That’s when the cost-cutting starts. And that’s when a solid 4×6 beam quietly becomes a glued one.

One early sign we noticed: not long after that, we could no longer drop-ship Gorilla Playsets to our out-of-state customers. The decision made some sense in the moment — everyone was dealing with supply chain backlogs — but looking back, it was the first crack.

Gorilla is a dba of Playnation Play Systems, and Playnation got folded into Backyard Products — a much bigger manufacturer out of Monroe, Michigan that turns out more wood storage sheds than anyone else in North America and sells through Lowe’s, Costco, and Home Depot. Backyard Products has been private-equity backed for years: Source Capital and Centerfield Capital Partners have held ownership since 2005, and Cyprium Partners later came in with mezzanine debt and a non-control investment — a lender and minority backer, not someone running the place day to day. None of that changes the point I’m making. Gorilla stopped being a founder-run brand and became one piece of a bigger operation that answers to outside capital first.

Prior to opening NJ Swingsets & Playgrounds, my background was in implementing new technology at large banks. I worked at Lehman Brothers when they went down in 2008. My last job was at a huge global investment bank at 60 Wall Street.

I say this because I am familiar with corporate environments, and I am familiar with what happens to companies when they are taken over by private equity firms.

2021 wasn’t as crazy as 2020, but sales were still well above average because of everyone who couldn’t get a set in 2020. After 2021, residential sales were on a steady decline through early 2025.

You or a friend may have been to a birthday party in our store, or your school may have bought commercial playground equipment from us. That’s how we make up for a decline in one part of our business — by growing sales in other areas.

When a small business like NJ Swingsets & Playgrounds sees a steady (and predictable) decline in sales, we pivot.

A Private Equity firm, on the other hand, takes out their trusty textbooks and picks tactics that other corporations have used in the past to decrease expenses and increase bottom line.

These include, but aren’t limited to:

• Decreasing product quality while increasing price (example: replacing real sugar with artificial sugar)
• Decreasing product size while increasing price (example: ice cream goes from a 16oz to a 12oz container)
• Cutting every possible dollar that doesn’t contribute to profits (example: removing coffee machines from the office, tracking personal days, putting locks on office supply closets)
• Pushing certain expenses onto the customer (instead of absorbing credit card fees, customers get charged a 4% fee)

I could go on with this list, but you get the point.

When companies start trimming the fat, they also cut a lot of the good stuff. By “good stuff” I mean the product itself, and the human element. Things get cut from the product that made it special in the first place, and the human element is what makes a company special to begin with.

A company can easily turn into a worker factory if the human element gets ignored. Workers feel it when they’re treated like cattle. A customer can feel it too, when they’re treated like just another number.

This is why I left corporate America years ago and started NJ Swingsets & Playgrounds. Employees were treated like worker drones. Customers were treated as numbers on a spreadsheet.

I vowed to NEVER let this happen in my company, and I vowed to NEVER work with a company that allows it in theirs.

That’s some context on our situation, without getting too deep into the weeds.

Are Gorilla Playsets Still Good Quality?

Outside of the human element we just talked about, the swing set companies we represent have to be held to a real standard of quality. I made a video back in 2014 you can still find on YouTube about what makes a “quality” swing set.

The video itself is rough. For the love of all that’s holy, please don’t watch it — but the description lists 7 things that make up a quality wooden swing set, and I cover the same 7 in more depth in my article on the top 7 features of the best swing sets.

Other than point 7, which is about price, everything still holds up as a framework. In 2014, when I made that video, Gorilla Playsets checked all 7 boxes. As of 2025, despite costs being over 50% higher, they don’t anymore.

1. The wood. A quality wooden swing set is made from Cedar, Premium Preserved Pine, or Redwood. Cedar is generally regarded as the best all-around wood. Premium Preserved Pine is generally the most durable and long-lasting. Redwood is generally regarded as the highest quality and most beautiful.
   
   2025 Update — still true, though Redwood and Pine have jumped in cost more than cedar over the past 10 years. Cedar sets still give you the best value for your money, and Gorilla Playsets are still made from cedar.
2. The deck height. A quality wooden swing set has a deck height of at least 5 feet. The most popular sets come with a 4, 5, or 6-foot deck. We recommend at least 5 feet — sets with a 5-foot deck are large enough for kids as they grow, where smaller decks aren’t as well suited for older children.
   
   2025 Update — this idea still holds, but Gorilla is introducing more sets with a 4-foot deck into their line. Decks we’ve installed that were listed at 5 feet measured 4’10" when we put a tape measure on them. Online, that gives the illusion of size and quality when the set is actually smaller and more cheaply made. Small tweaks like this protect profit margins while cutting quality.
3. The swing beam. A quality wooden swing set has a swing beam made from a single solid 4×6″ piece of wood. Many lower-quality sets substitute smaller pieces here, which makes for a less sturdy set.
   
   2025 Update — solid timber is still what high-quality sets use. Unfortunately, as of 2025, Gorilla’s beams are 2-3 pieces of wood glued together.
4. The A-frame. A quality wooden swing set has an A-frame made of two 4×4″ pieces of wood. Many A-frames (the beams that hold the main swing beam up) are made of 2×4″ pieces, or glued-together wood, resulting in a much less sturdy setup.
   
   2025 Update — a quality A-frame made of two solid 4×4″ pieces is still the standard. Gorilla’s A-frames are now also made of 2-3 pieces of wood glued together.
5. Pre-drilled holes. A quality wooden swing set comes with pre-drilled holes. A set without them is a nightmare to install, and any drilling mistakes can crack wood and void the warranty.
   
   2025 Update — still holds. Gorilla still pre-drills the holes on most of their sets.
6. The warranty. A quality wooden swing set has at least a 10-year warranty on the wood and a 1-year warranty on accessories. Most cedar sets come with a 10 or 15-year warranty. Most Premium Preserved Pine and Redwood sets come with a lifetime warranty. We recommend nothing less.
   
   2025 Update — Gorilla still honors a 10-year warranty on the wood, but what’s covered has changed. As of this writing, mold and insect damage are excluded, and we’ve seen a real uptick in customers reporting mold and insect issues we can’t get reimbursed for fixing. The warranty also requires yearly maintenance — skip it, and the warranty isn’t honored. I can’t point to an exact date these exclusions were added, but it lines up with around the time they were sold. That’s the warranty as it stands today, not a claim about the exact moment it changed. If you have a current warranty question, reach out and I’ll help you track down the current terms.
7. The price. A quality wooden swing set with all of the above will cost at least $1,500. That doesn’t mean you can’t find a quality set under $1,500 — it just means it won’t have all 7 of these qualities.
   
   2025 Update — I’d put the adjusted number closer to $2,500 now, not including installation. That’s not a claim that every $2,500-plus set is automatically high quality. If something looks amazing for well under $2,500, do your homework.

Are the Slides Still Good Quality?

The slides used to be double-walled with thicker plastic. They’re now cheaper, single-walled plastic slides. We’ve had to replace a fair number of them because customers didn’t follow the weight limit.

Is the Bracketing System Still Solid?

The bracketing system, while not poor quality on its own, is a step down from the traditional bolt-through construction we prefer.

What About the Rails and Grab Rails?

The rails on the ladders are gone, and the grab rails on the tower are plastic instead of metal. Other brands still use metal grab rails on both the ladder and the platform.

Why Does Gorilla Favor Big-Box Stores Over Local Dealers?

Gorilla has made two decisions over the past couple of years that land the same way either way you read their intent: solo installers and local dealers are getting squeezed out, and big-box stores are picking up the business instead.

Decision 1 — removing local installers from their site. In 2024, Gorilla removed a page that had listed local installers in all 50 states. Installers who called us afterward told us their volume had dropped by half without warning. We had a number of local installers reach out to us for work last year because their installation volume had been cut in half.

Those experienced installers were replaced by lowest-bidder contractors. Big-box stores will pay a certain price and no more, and that leads to inexperienced workers installing a set your kids are going to be playing on.

Decision 2 — directing support to big-box stores instead of local dealers. Rather than support local dealers so we can sell more of their product, the money is going toward selling direct to customers and supporting big-box stores.

Big-box stores get priority. Gorilla will drop-ship for them and won’t drop-ship for small businesses. They also get quantity discounts we can’t match — Gorilla does extend some pricing to local dealers, but it’s nearly impossible to compete with combined big-box buying power.

Gorilla lets any dealer, big-box included, list a swing set at any price, even at a loss. Short-term, the customer gets a great deal. Long-term, it devalues the brand and hurts anyone reselling the product — previous customers come to expect lower pricing from the brand permanently, and new customers assume the brand is lower quality.

We believe competition is good — it leads to better products, lower prices, and more innovation. In this case, though, lower prices are happening without a better product or any real innovation behind them. The focus is short-term, and the human element that gives a business life gets neglected.

What We Sell Instead of Gorilla Playsets

We didn’t stop selling swing sets — we stopped selling this particular brand. If you’re trying to figure out wood versus vinyl for your own yard, I wrote up the differences in Vinyl Swing Set vs Wood: What’s the Difference and Which Is Better.

If budget is the main question on your mind before you even get to brand, read Why You Shouldn’t Buy a Cheap Swing Set first — it’ll save you a bad surprise a year or two in.

Not sure what fits your yard? A yard consultation gets you a real answer instead of a guess, and there’s no obligation attached to it.

The Bottom Line

As a family-owned, local dealer, my kids are playing on these sets. My friends’ kids are playing on these sets. People all over my community are playing on these sets.

We need to sell products we believe in, from companies that treat us and our customers with respect.

Thank you for reading, and THANK YOU for supporting your local, small business.

— Jay Samolowicz

Frequently Asked Questions