Keeper Of The Flame

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Back then, growth had seemed like serendipity, the natural flowering of Syme's vision. Now, growth, if it comes, must be fought for. Personal vision, by itself, will not be enough. State-of-the art technology and a relentless commitment to quality, a dedicated founder and a motivated work force will not be enough, either. They are just a start -- necessary, but not sufficient.

It's not even enough to build the best stove in the world -- it probably never was.

The legend of the Defiant began prosaically enough with two young men in a bar and grill in Crested Butte, Colo., in 1970 -- the tail end of the Age of Aquarius. Twenty-five-year-old Murray Howell, co-owner of The Tailings, was a University of Pennsylvania political-science graduate getting his head together, working behind the bar. Thirty-two-year-old Duncan Syme, a Yale-trained sculptor and architect, was drifting through town.

Night after night the two would sit, sipping their Budweisers and listening to the jukebox, wondering, as young men will, what to do with their lives. Wouldn't it be nice to move back to the land, they'd ask each other, to live in rural New England? To work as honest craftsmen and live as brothers, building something to be proud of, free from the tyranny of suit and tie?

They even developed a name for the vision: "the New Hampshire ball-bearing factory," they called it, shared shorthand for the business they promised they would start together. They didn't know what they could build, exactly. But they agreed it would have to be something "rare and unusual," magic for everyone it touched.

Flash forward to 1975, after the two friends have moved back East. Howell, in suit and tie, was working for New York City's Lazard Frères & Co. Syme, now married to Howell's sister, was still drifting, a subsistence architect trying, without much luck, to build energy-efficient houses in tiny Warren, Vt., living in a drafty wood shop.

Wood stoves seemed to be everywhere that winter in counterculture New England. Syme himself heated with an old Montgomery Ward coal burner he'd converted. Then one particularly frosty March night Syme didn't get up to feed the fire, and he woke up to an 11-degree chill outside his covers.

Syme was a tinkerer. He wasn't thinking about starting a stove business initially; all he wanted was to build himself a better stove. "But then I looked at the stoves that were around. Most of them didn't work very well. A few worked well enough but looked terrible." So he talked with Howell in New York -- could this be their chance?

Howell had seen the market opportunity himself. With the birth of OPEC and the rise of oil prices, wood heating was hot -- not only economically and environmentally sound, but morally righteous, a way to assert your independence from Exxon, Shell, and the oil sheiks. In the two years since its introduction, sales of the imported Jotul were said to be as high as 40,000 units. Even U.S. stove companies were growing, selling giant wood-eating behemoths designed in the nineteenth century, as ugly as they were inefficient. So Howell moved up to Vermont with $25,000 in seed money.

Their intentions were modest, Syme says. "We wanted to make a stove that was better looking than anything else on the market -- and worked a little better, too, if possible." Howell ran "stove races," competitive firings of the stoves already on the market. Syme sketched out designs and gave himself a crash course in wood burning. He stumbled eventually onto the breakthrough resource: boxes of World War II research on the distillation of wood, moldering in the cellar of a retired professor.

They called their first stove the Defiant, for its ability to defy the winter winds. And it wasn't a little better, it was a lot better. Other stoves delivered, at most, 40% of the wood's heat. The Defiant, airtight and thermostatically controlled, delivered 60%. Other stoves were ungainly boxes; Syme's Defiant looked like heirloom furniture. Other stoves could warm your house. The Defiant could warm your heart, with doors you could swing wide if, like Syme, you wanted to sit and dream in front of an open flame.

"A sensible piece of hardware," Syme called it modestly. "I thought if we were lucky we could sell enough that Murray and I could make $10,000 a year, enough to live in a beautiful area and do what we wanted." Instead, they sold their first 200 units before they started production, on the basis of their design sketches alone.

Within a year they had sold some $250,000 worth.

Within five years they were on the Inc. 500, the fastest-growing stove company in America.