The cost of a fixture

A fixture is the jig that holds a piece of stone still while it is cut. It is specific to one object. It cannot be adapted, it cannot be borrowed from another product, and it has to be made before the first sale exists to pay for it.

Ours are steel, and they are made in Sheffield by someone who has been making them for thirty years. A simple one — a disc, say, held on its face — takes about three weeks and costs somewhere near four thousand pounds. Something with a bore through it, or an arch, or a wall thin enough to flex, takes two months and costs more than we made on the object it was built for.

This is the part of manufacturing that nobody photographs. It is also the part that decides what a company is. If the fixture is cheap, you can afford to be wrong, and being able to afford to be wrong is how a catalogue gets to two hundred items, most of which are the same object in a different colour.

We cannot afford to be wrong. So we design for a year, cut one, live with it for a season, and only then commit to the tooling. It is a slow, expensive, faintly ridiculous way to run a business, and it is the only reason the twelve things we sell are worth keeping.

The upside is that a fixture, once made, does not wear out. Fixture 07 has cut every Counterweight we have ever sold. It will outlast us, and it will still be square.