At about the same time, one of Howell's sisters called him in New York. She said she had been trying to buy an Ashley wood stove, but everyone always seemed to be sold out. Howell said he would try to locate one. He called dealer after dealer, with no better results. Finally, one dealer near Howell's sister told him when he expected his next shipment. She was waiting on the doorstep when the stove arrived.
"Murray called me," Syme says, "and told me about his sister's experience. He said somebody was asleep at the switch. I was beginning to think about wood stoves, too. You couldn't live in northern New England and not be aware of them."
Meanwhile, the demand for wood stoves was surging. "We really began to feel it in 1974," says Allen Tomlinson, of Martin Industries, one of the oldest stove manufacturers in the country. "That year we went to double shifts. Compared to what we were doing in the 1960s, our business nearly tripled by the late 1970s." But, says Tomlinson, the boom wasn't going unnoticed. "At one time," he recalls, "we counted over 300 competitors. It seemed like everyone with a garage and a welding torch was getting into the business."
In the spring of 1975, Duncan and his friends at the architectural firm in Warren held a contest among themselves to see who could design the most efficient and aesthetically pleasing wood stove. They had half-intended to start making stoves themselves. Syme had already converted a 1928 Montgomery Ward & Co. coal furnace into a wood stove to heat the loft where he was living. But he built on this practical knowledge by studying, among other sources, an accounting of combustion principles published by the Food and Agricultural section of the United Nations for use in Central Europe. Syme won the contest with a design for a cast-iron wood-burner he called the Defiant. He felt it would defy the winter winds.
The prototype was airtight and thermostatically controlled so that the heat output could be predetermined and maintained for hours. It had a baffled firebox that created a 60-inch, horizontal flame path, which extracted additional heat from the escaping gases. And it had an internal system of preheated primary and secondary air to help ignite these gases before they were lost up the flue. But Syme had also designed the stove to please the eye and the spirit. While many wood stoves were square, squat, and ugly, concerned with function alone, the Defiant featured a gracefully bowed front and, over the fireplace opening, an elliptical arch reminiscent of northern New England's early-nineteenth-century architecture. With the damper down and the double-arched doors open, owners could lose themselves in the traditional reveries of an open fire.
Howell and Syme needed an objective appraisal of the stove's merits from someone who knew the market. They took the design drawings to Burlington, Vt., where they visited the stove department at the Garden Way Living Center. Paul Bortz, who was manager of the store and has since gone on to found Vermont Stove Co., manufacturer of the Shelburne Fireplace Stove, remembers the day. "They were dressed very casually," he says, "like backwoods Vermont, and, almost shyly, they said they wanted to talk to me about an idea they had for a wood stove.
"They showed me some drawings and I was amazed. They revolutionized the whole industry, because their stove was both functional and attractive. Before them you got one or the other, but not both." Bortz made some suggestions, and Howell and Syme came back with revised drawings. "I gave them an order for 200 Defiants," Bortz says. "I think even then they realized they had a tiger by the tail." In July, Howell and Syme incorporated Vermont Castings.
In January 1981, Syme gave a speech at the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H., in which he described the company's meteoric rise. A student from the audience asked whether the company had ever made any mistakes. "No, we never made any mistakes," Syme replied, and was immediately cut off by cheering from the students. "Because," he continued, "the growth rate of the industry covered them up."
In their early days, for example, Howell and Syme had no specific plan for distribution. "At that point," Syme says, "we were so concerned about manufacturing, well, marketing, shmarketing, we didn't even think about it." Growing even faster than the number of new stove manufacturers was the number of new stove dealers. Drawn by easy profit and quick turnover, an assortment of retailers found space for stoves. Hardware stores did a brisk business, specialty stores featuring only stoves and accessories began to appear. And even furniture stores were getting in on the action.
Howell and Syme more or less decided to use dealers as well, but they signed up only two. They didn't sign up their third dealer, Tony Anthony, owner of Sandhill Inc., in Peterborough, N.H., until four years later. Anthony's case was unusual. For nearly a year and a half before he became a Vermont Castings dealer he had been buying stoves from the company at full retail price. "I didn't make any money on them," Anthony says, "but they were the best stoves around, and I wanted those stoves in my store."
In the fall of 1975, an article about the stoves appeared in the now-defunct New Times magazine, and Vermont Castings was soon flooded with postcards from people who wanted more information about the Defiant. According to Paul Bortz, Vermont Castings became the first stove manufacturer to use mail order in any meaningful way. "We never sat down and calculated some fancy mail-order strategy." Howell says. "We kind of backed into mail order. We put together a one-page flier and people started sending us $50 deposits -- actual money. The demand was so high, we could've set up a concession stand on the moon and sold them."
"Up until 1981," Syme says, "I don't think we ever had a stove lying around here that hadn't already been spoken for."
Demand took care of itself, but finding foundries that could meet Syme and Howell's quality standards and still keep pace with demand was another matter. By 1978, in fact, the company had already outgrown two domestic foundries and was dealing with two in Europe -- one in Germany and one in Holland.
Howell and Syme decided on a very direct, yet daring, solution to their foundry problem: In 1979, they built their own. Not only was the $5.5 million investment large for a company whose sales then were roughly $16 million, but it occurred when other U.S. companies were actually closing their foundry operations and importing stove plate from Taiwan. According to research by a member of Vermont Castings' staff, there hadn't been a foundry built for the casting of stove plate since almost the turn of the century. In addition, Vermont Castings' immediate needs called for only 25% of the new foundry's capacity. It was, if anything, an investment in the future.
