Dowling Solid Fuel Stoves - Hand built in Galloway, Scotland
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We’re slightly wary of the tag 'craftsmanship' - on the one hand, it’s overused, and applied misleadingly to mass produced articles, or else associated with luxury one-off production. Of course, we take pride in our manual skills. You don’t need many tools for steel fabrication. Oxy-propane for cutting, arc welding for fusing the steel, and a couple of grinders to finish, but you need a lot of skill, and we’d accept any challenge on our fabrication ability. But the real satisfaction is to be able to design, build, and install a stove faster than an average retailer can supply from stock, and still beat them on price! |
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Manual skill means that we don’t need to tie capital up in elaborate machinery, so we’re not committed to one model. The costs of tooling up to make a mass-produced stove, plus the expense of research and development, commit the large manufacturer to runs of hundreds of units to be economical; then add the promotion and distributors’ costs. It also persuades the manufacturer to caution, the only way to hedge the bet of innovative design is detailed market research, which levers yet more expense into the initial costs. We can have an idea prototyped and under test within a week. That said, there is a certain logic and persuasion that a product exerts on the designer. I sometimes wonder who the boss is, the maker or the stove itself. So, as long as we can sell direct, our minimal distribution and overhead costs mean that we can compete head on with mass production. £ per kilowatt to buy, our stoves can knock the spots off any competition.
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When longevity and custom building is taken into consideration, we reckon a Dowling becomes a rare example of craft out performing mass production. Even buying on H.P. at 11% flat rate, our stoves will pay for themselves in fuel saved within 18 months. Quality of life finds its way into our work. We live and work in Galloway, a beautiful and unsung corner of Southwest Scotland. The Bladnoch Distillery lies just across the river which flows by the workshop; up the hill, the old county town of Wigtown (now Scotland’s Official Book Town, God bless her!), stands framed against the Galloway hills. The penalty of this idyll? Approximately one third of the cost of rent and rates compared with property in an urban industrial estate! Come on guys, where’s the downside? - Well, we have to find a lot of our customer base outside this thinly populated area, but that’s about it. Material costs are slightly higher, but as already pointed out, that’s only a small proportion of our production costs; humans are cheaper to run here because we don’t pay inflationary rents! |
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