But there have been many positives on this journey. We have fulfilled the dream of building high quality fire pits that last and we sold over 700 in our 1.5 years of trading. I have personally fulfilled a dream of running a D2C (Direct to Consumer) business with personalisation of the product at it's core.  We sold over £250k worth of fire pits, impressive for less than 2 years of trading. We have many satisfied customers and a very very small number of returns. (I could count them on one hand.) ​

It's worth noting that we have had no support from the government as we set up after the support monies were put in place. No furlough money for us. No government loans or grants. We survived on the quality of our product and our abilities to market it.

The final straw for the business was being hit by the vagaries of the British weather. The unusually wet summer of 2021 being very disappointing for all of us living in the UK. This left our projected sales in tatters and like many in the outdoor and gardening sector, we found ourselves having to scale back dramatically, losing our lovely staff whom we had trained and looked after for many months.

Running any business is hard work and both directors have been running businesses most of their careers so used to that effort. But starting and running a UK manufacturing business in the midst of a pandemic, then dealing with unexpected rising steel and energy costs has become untenable.  It's a painful decision to close our lovely ethical, UK business but we are now in the process of shutting it down and selling off remaining stock.