December 2021. Bison Hill didn’t officially exist yet — the company was registered in February 2022. The Gaucho BBQ Grill Apron was eleven months away from its November 2022 launch. We were in the gap between conviction and execution, and the honest account of that moment is that we knew some things clearly and hadn’t yet solved others at all.
What We Had
The brief was written and had been for months. Twelve requirements, tested against every existing product on the market, none of which passed more than five. The material choice was made — 12oz heavy denim, after testing and eliminating four other options. A manufacturing partner had been identified in principle through the STEAMhouse network, not yet contracted but the relationship was there. The name was in progress. The brand pillars — FIRE-TESTED, UK-MADE, SMALL BATCH, BUY ONCE — were already written.
The concept sketches had produced two viable candidates for prototyping. The structural decisions — crossback straps, full-length front skirt, integrated utility features — were already locked. We knew what we were going to build.
What We Didn’t Have
No working prototype. No confirmed funding. No launch date. No customers, no reviews, no track record. The Reigate and Banstead Business Support Grant hadn’t been confirmed yet. The company didn’t legally exist.
More fundamentally: we didn’t know if the market would pay for a product built to this specification at the price point that honestly reflected the cost of making it. We believed it would. We had the market data, we had the product gap, we had the growing live fire cooking segment. But belief and proof are different things, and in December 2021 we had the first and not the second.
The Decision
We made the call: register the company in February, build prototype one in Q1, iterate through 2022, launch end of year. That plan turned out to be accurate — which is either good planning or good luck, probably some of both.
The useful thing about December 2021 in retrospect is that the uncertainty didn’t change the direction. We knew the product was needed, we knew we could make it properly, and we knew the right way to find out if the market agreed was to build it and see. There was no version of December 2021 where we sat on the research and concluded it was too uncertain to proceed. You don’t build a brand by waiting for certainty that doesn’t come.
