The story of Fabulous Firepits

We set up Fabulous Firepits in the middle of the pandemic in July 2020 with the goal of building fire pits that lasted and the expectation that, as a business, we'd last too. Sadly we recently took the decision to scale down and possibly close the business.
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We have faced a plethora of challenges since we started the business. We've seen steel prices rise by 300%. We've seen paint prices rise by 20%.  We've seen our marketing costs rise by over 400%.  Availability of welding gas and paint has also left us unable to make fire pits at times adding to stress levels and costs.

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.) ​

We employed a small group of local people and paid good wages to them. Sadly the same cannot be said for the directors, but that is the risk of running your own business.

​I am proud that we created a range of innovative products, even launching the UK's first smokeless fire pit. And we had dreams to make them even better... but alas it was not to be.​

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 wind down our lovely ethical UK business but we are now in the process of scaling it down and selling off remaining stock. We are hoping to continue selling smokeless fire pits.

We wish all our customers many happy evenings with their fire pits.

​Eric
​Director, Fabulous Firepits