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.
The Defiant was a phenomenon. Like the Apple computer, to which it was widely compared, it was as much a symbol as a product. The customers who flocked to the showroom weren't just buying a stove, they were buying membership in a tribe, bound into the Vermont Castings dream through the "Owners' News" and a toll-free line that would put you in touch with a fellow stove freak back in Randolph, Vt., ready to talk burn times and cords. Few products have ever won as much customer loyalty: proud owners sent thank-you notes to the Vermont craftsmen who built it, or Christmas cards with their stoves the center of the family picture.
"Marketing, schmarketing," Syme said; they couldn't build stoves fast enough. They priced their product high, adding a 50% margin to their costs and operating expenses, then adding another 30% margin for their dealers. But the price didn't seem to matter. From day one a steady stream of customers had shown up at their door, cash in hand, drawn by word of mouth or one of the growing number of glowing stories in the press. Why pay a dealer's margin? One flier, circulated locally, led them into mail order, and a customer base that stretched through Michigan's Upper Peninsula and into California's Big Sur. There was no need to pitch the Defiant; its quality and artistry spoke for themselves. It would take six years to catch up with demand: the orders and the cash just kept flowing in.
The two partners managed by instinct, working at opposite ends of a long wooden trestle with Howell as the businessman and Syme as the creative force. "We weren't two guys with an M.B.A.'s notion of how to kill the world. We had a strong sense of ethics and morals, and out of those came habits and decisions. We did our best to make the best -- not because it had marketing value, but because it seemed the right way to express what we wanted to do."
The success of the Defiant seemed eloquent proof that they'd been right-on when they'd sat dreaming in the bar in Crested Butte, they agreed. "So let's put that into everything we do -- the quality of the literature, the way we serve our customers, everything. And let's make this an extraordinary experience for all of us -- if we aren't going to have that we might as well go work for someone else."
The religion of "rare and unusual" started with the product, "built to last forever," Syme insisted. Each stove was built twice: ground, dry-fitted, taken apart, and reground, then reassembled with furnace cement. Then it was signed, personally, by its builder.
