Keeper Of The Flame

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.

Howell and Syme didn't just preach excellence; they stood on the line, setting the example stove by stove. "It became standard practice that everybody who touched a casting was a QC inspector -- if you didn't like it you'd put it aside," Bill Floyd, Vermont Castings' first employee, remembers. "There was no close enough; it was either there, or it wasn't."

Everything about the stove had to surprise their customers, giving them more than they expected. Complaints were dealt with simply: if your stove didn't work you'd get a new one, no questions asked. "Our intention was for you to have acquired something of lasting value," Syme says. "If it failed in any way there was an implied breach that had to be rectified." You weren't buying a stove, you were buying membership in a movement,

It was a rare and unusual place to work, too: the best wages and benefits in the region, profit sharing, and the satisfaction of knowing you were number one. They worked hard, double shifts to meet demand, but they partied hard, too, departmental six-packs for a production record broken or a design problem solved, company wide Christmas parties and Halloween parties, and a spring fling on the day the winter's snow finally disappeared.

Planning, such as it was, was casual. "We never considered anything as sophisticated as developing 'a line,' " Syme says. "The Defiant was selling like crazy, but after you hear 150 times from customers that it's too big, you get the idea." So Syme designed the Vigilant, a smaller stove with still higher efficiency, adding optional glass on the doors. Thus began a steady stream of new stoves, each more combustion efficient than the last, each with new customer-oriented features.

The only problem was the supply of parts. Few of America's rusting foundries produced parts of high enough quality. But depending on the more sophisticated European facilities limited Vermont Castings' flexibility to build whatever those people on the phone wanted. In 1979 Syme and Howell built a facility of their own, the first new foundry for the casting of stove plate to be built in the United States since the turn of the century.

They dreamed big, designing the foundry with capacity for $50 million in stoves. Growth, they felt, was "manifest destiny"; they were building the industry juggernaut, with $50 million in sales the next plateau. They'd already started bringing in new managers, outside professionals to help them take that step.

The bankers were skeptical. But it didn't matter what the bankers thought. Stoves were selling so fast that Syme and Howell paid all but $250,000 of the $5.5-million construction cost out of cash flow.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6  NEXT