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Like most friends who have known each other a long time, Tom Eltang and I have a series of discussions that are regularly reintroduced into our discourse. Some of these are ridiculous, like our plan to share a Gulfstream jet so that we can smoke while flying over the Atlantic (suffice it to say, it ain't happening). Some of these are serious subjects, things you'd expect, like discussion of the future of artisan pipes or changes in the wider pipe market.
Some of our conversations begin as semi-serious notions, but develop into "Hey, this is actually doable!" as we hash things out. For as long as I've known Tom, he's wanted a pipe tobacco brand to carry his name. He wanted, needed to do it right however. He wanted to be deeply involved in the branding, marketing, and development of the blends. He'd talked to a number of manufacturers, but didn't find quite the balance of involvement and services he was looking for. I'd helped and advised a little here and there, but not much came of it over the years.
At the beginning of 2014, Cornell & Diehl was merged into Smokingpipes.com's parent company, Laudisi Enterprises. I was a little busy at the time, trying to keep everything from breaking as we systematically got C&D on all of Laudisi's accounting and payroll and business process platforms. Frankly, there was sufficient chaos that I hadn't really thought about the discussions I'd long been having with Tom. Then one afternoon during the second week in January, my cell phone rang. The conversation went sort of like this:
Tom: Hi Sykes!
Sykes: Hey Tom, how are you?
Tom: Are you ready?
Sykes: tentatively, with no idea what Tom's talking about Ah, ready for what, Tom?
Tom: When are we making Eltang tobacco? You do have a tobacco factory now, right?
Sykes: feigning confidence Yeah! Absolutely Tom. We're ready when you are!
The truth is, right then, Chris Tarler, Ted Swearingen, and I were totally buried in the myriad of details associated with trying to marry two companies, from two very different fields of our industry, into one company. We were a long way from ready, but I kept the discussion going, knowing it would take time for things to develop anyway. I sent Tom a bunch of blending components and examples of different blends, mixtures and flakes and whatnot that C&D makes, hoping that would a) prove useful to him, and b) keep him busy until Chris, Ted, and I had things better organized at C&D.
Actually, it was beginning to dawn on me that Tom was thinking about all of this in pretty sophisticated ways. I mean, that shouldn't have surprised me. I have tremendous respect for Tom; he's a very astute guy. But I realized as I talked it through with him that he not only had come up with very definite ideas on what he wanted, he also had a really good sense of what made a successful blend.
So, we kept talking, perhaps once a week, for another six weeks. And we set up a time for him to come visit. My travel schedule meant that the only real window we had to work with was early August. Tom ended up flying in to the Carolinas five days before I was to leave for Denmark.
I picked Tom up in Charlotte and we drove the rest of the way up to the Morganton factory together. We spent three days tasting tobaccos, trying out different iterations of each of the four blends. Keep in mind that samples had been crossing the Atlantic for some time at that point, so it was mostly a matter of refining ideas that we'd been working on for months. Eltang English came together the most easily, requiring just a couple of attempts to hit the flavor profile that Tom was looking for. The Eltang Virginia proved the most challenging. Surprising? Often the simplest blends are the hardest to get just right, little changes going a long way to alter their character. With each iteration, Chris Tarler, Tom, and I would discuss, look for things to improve or change and try again. At each iteration, Chris carefully guided us through the process, responding to our (often vague) attempts to pin down and describe how changing x had result y in the blend with ways to round out what Tom was looking for.
Lars Kiel had designed the label and tin insert, but we still had some refining and polishing of the artwork and tin descriptions to work out back at the main office in Little River, SC, and so we spent the last day of the trip putting our heads together on those sorts of things. By the end of it all, we had four great blends and most of the ancillary bits figured out.
I'm writing this from Amsterdam's Schiphol airport as I travel to Copenhagen for Tom's 40th Anniversary party, which is where the Eltang tobaccos are also being officially unveiled on September 17th (the day our people in Little River should have this up and ready, and simultaneous to the Eltang blends' US launch at Smokingpipes.com and other major retailers). Tom describes this project of creating blends he'll be proud to have his name on as fifteen years in the making. To my mind it's especially fitting that it could all come together in time with Tom's anniversary as a pipe maker, and we at Laudisi, Smokingpipes, C&D, the whole shebang, are proud to have helped make it happen.
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