About Us

From humble beginnings in a disused tractor shed in the heart of Cornwall, the Heat and Plumb team has rapidly expanded in the last decade. Having led the way in so many areas, it seems apt that the company now in charge of this website is named Pioneer Bathrooms. Unlike many competitors who have been swallowed up by large corporate entities, Heat and Plumb proudly remains one of the leading independent companies in the heating and plumbing sector.

In the early 2000s, with e-commerce still in relative infancy, www.heatandplumb.com became one of the first websites to successfully market boilers and cylinders on the Internet. A small team of 3 grew to around 20 in just a few months, with Google and other search engines choosing to rank the website highly. The tractor shed soon evolved into a real set of offices, complete with a warehousing operation and dedicated sales and customer services agents.

In the mid-2000s, with the business growing year-on-year and bathrooms becoming a key area of growth for the company, Heat and Plumb created and trademarked the Duchy brand of bathrooms. Once again, Heat and Plumb led the way in being among the first Internet companies to branch out into own-branding. The Duchy range was a massive success, and is installed in thousands of homes across the country. To this day, many designs seen on the market are from the same moulds as the trailblazing Duchy bathroom collection.

With a large warehouse full of stock and a solid team operating the accounts, customer services, sales and IT sides of the business, Heat and Plumb became one of the first Internet-only businesses in the sector to open a physical showroom. Showcasing some of the biggest brand names as well as the newly-expanded Duchy range (which now included shower enclosures, steam rooms, saunas and whirlpool baths), the showroom was commended by many as being the biggest and best-looking in the South West. Radio and TV adverts followed, and the brand was soon becoming a household name, always looking to branch out.

With the global market crash of the late 2000s, the earlier ingenuity and expansion would end up costing Heat and Plumb dear. Based in the appealing but quiet Cornish town of Wadebridge, the showroom struggled to turn a profit and became unsustainable. The added expenses of having a large premises and staff to man it, coupled with a slow-down in website revenue due to the credit crunch, led to tougher times. After a long period of mismanagement, the company was forced to lay off all 25+ staff, and it seemed as if the website would shut down.

In early 2012, Pioneer Bathrooms, a successful manufacturer and distributor of bathroom furniture, acquired the domain name and re-launched the website with altered branding to reflect the new ownership. With headquarters now in London, and a small team of 5, Heat and Plumb had come full circle. After steady growth in the following years, Heat and Plumb was the first brand asked to sell on Tesco Direct - a partnership that ultimately did not work out in the long term.

Nowadays, Heat and Plumb employs over 50 staff in 7 different offices throughout the world, and many new brands have been devised and launched: including MaxHeat, Prestige, Cali and Verona. The website now services almost 3 times as many orders as in the previous peak, and the business has scaled at a sensible rate, leading to thousands of positive reviews of our service. We are still proud to be an independent company who values the custom it receives. Thank you for choosing to shop with us!