Christmas week, 2025. The brand is approaching four years old. The last personalised orders are out. The embroidery workshop is closed for Christmas. Here is where we are and what we are thinking.
Bison Hill started because we could not find a BBQ apron worth using. That is the honest version. We looked at what was available — novelty prints, thin synthetic canvas, oversized fits designed for a photograph rather than a fire — and decided that if it did not exist, we should make it. Eleven months later, after four prototypes, fire tests, and the specific problem of finding waxed denim that could handle sustained heat without feeling like wearing a bin bag, we shipped the first Gaucho Apron in July 2022.
In the four years since, the range has grown from one product to fifteen or more, including eight gift sets. The Bison Hill Grill has gone from a concept to forty-plus events per year. Reviews have gone from zero to 109. The brand has moved from unknown to regularly appearing on gift recommendation lists written by people who found it independently.
The part that matters
This Christmas week, our own team used the Gaucho, the King Fork, and the BBQ Block at a family Christmas cook. Not for a photoshoot. Not for a demonstration. For Christmas lunch, over a real fire, the same way we have been using it since 2022.
Every apron that shipped in December 2025 was made in the UK, by hand, with the same materials and the same construction as the first batch in 2022. The English oak in the BBQ Blocks is still locally sourced. The embroidery is still done by the same workshop, by adults with learning disabilities, by hand. None of that has changed in four years. None of it is changing.
That is not an accident. It is not a marketing position. It is the point. The four pillars — FIRE-TESTED, UK-MADE, SMALL BATCH, BUY-ONCE — are not values we adopted when we got large enough to need them. They were the founding decisions, made before the first product shipped, because they described the only way we were willing to build the brand.
See you in 2026. There is more to do.
