As you may know – Chimney Sheep LTD has been around for several years. We celebrated our fifth birthday in 2017, making us 7 YEARS OLD!
Throughout the years we’ve featured in many different press releases, ranging from magazine articles, online write-ups; even FRONT PAGE NEWS.
Here we’ve included some snippets – telling the story of Chimney Sheep LTD and how we’ve got to where we are now!
Chimney Sheep ? It’s not a baaarmy idea!
Our First Article!
This lovely feature in our local Times & Star gave a great summary on how Chimney Sheep began – a great story to celebrate the opening of our brand new business!
When Sally moved into her Victorian era home in the Lake District – she soon realised that there was a large amount of heat being lost from her home – despite new and improved insulation measures… She soon narrowed the culprit down to her the chimney, it was drawing a significant amount of hot air up and out of the house – making the brand new heat saving measures almost redundant.
”She hit upon the idea of using the fleece of Herdwick stuffed up the flue to stop the heat escaping”
The Herdwick fleece provided a great balance between density, toughness, and flexibility meaning it held itself inside the chimney – squashing itself into place while still maintaining its integrity.
The Chimney Sheep was Born!
Not such a baaaad idea: Woollen chimney draft excluder business is starting to warm up!
A great article in the Daily Mail telling the story of how the Chimney Sheep came to be – including some of our first challenges and successes as a business!
Every business start up requires funding – unfortunately Chimney Sheep was unable to acquire funding via the usual routes – we were denied by corporate lenders meaning we had to raise the funding through other means.
Sally was able to obtain the funding using family savings and a helpful grant from Rural England.
After spending years testing prototypes the Chimney Sheep was brought to market in late 2012 – we received brilliant feedback from all our customers in the first few sales.
Our first customer, Ruth Carroll gave us this brilliant review: ”It’s just what we need for my daughter’s bedroom. We never use the fire but it’s a lovely feature in her room so we wanted to keep it. However, we were aware that such a lot of heat from the central heating is lost up the chimney, also because it’s an old chimney a lot of dust and debris falls down. The Sheep squashes in to fit the gap perfectly- Thank you Sally!”
So much so that a couple of months after the start of Chimney Sheep sales we were able to secure our first supplier – a fireplace shop in Ireland – a big win for such a small start up!
