When one learns about something and lives it so closely, it can be hard to remember a time that the knowledge one has wasn't there. I spoke with Sykes Wilford, who needs no introduction as Founder and CEO of Smokingpipes and Laudisi, about his first pipe story, and although he shared as many anecdotes as he could recall at this time, he was honest about just how muddled those memories are from the moment he decided to buy his first pipe to where he is now with over 25 years in the industry under his belt.

Sykes' First Pipe & Early Tobaccos

Much like distant childhood memories, it's tough to pinpoint where a spark of passion ignited a lifelong journey and business venture that has grown exponentially since 2000. "For 26 years plus of my life now," says Sykes, "pipes have loomed incredibly large. Trying to think back about how I thought about pipes before I knew all that stuff... it's hard to reframe in my head." Sykes remembers his father being a pipe smoker, although he largely stopped smoking at some point. "When I was a small child, he was still smoking a pipe, but not that frequently. It just sort of petered out by the time I was 8 or 9 years old. But there were pipes around the house."

Sykes doesn't think his father's smoking is really what sparked his interest. Instead, he believes that as a weirdly pretentious 18-year-old, picking up a pipe just seemed like the natural thing to do — so he decided to get his first one. "I don't really remember what happened between that first instance and being really into it, but I fell in love, and fell hard."

At the time, Sykes was living on a college student's budget in Nashville, Tennessee, sometime in 1998. He first went into Elliston Place Pipe and Tobacco, where he purchased a hanging bag of tobacco but held off on getting a $20 pipe, deciding it was much too costly. "My buddy and I walked from there and stopped at the Eckerd's on the way back to campus," he says, favoring spending less at the pharmacy near Vanderbilt's campus on the West End instead. That's where he picked up his first pipe: a Dr. Grabow, along with a generic Whiskey and a Cherry tobacco. "The Dr. Grabow was a straight Billiard, which has stuck all these years later."

"For 26 years plus of my life now," says Sykes, "pipes have loomed incredibly large."

As for his first smoking experience with that pipe, it was rough. "I torched my mouth. I didn't know what the hell I was doing and I smoked way too fast. It's amazing I didn't burn out that pipe." He remembers not eating dinner that night because his mouth hurt so much, and bought a Slurpee to dull the pain. Of course, given the trajectory of his career to come, pipe smoking eventually got better for him with time and after some trial and error. His friends at the time grew tired of hearing him talk about his newfound passion. It didn't stick for them — one of them even gave Sykes the pipe he'd bought that same day.

While looking for a part-time job, Sykes had a difficult time, receiving several "nos" before ending up back at Elliston Place Pipe and Tobacco as a customer looking for French cigarettes or pipe tobacco. "On the way out the door, I asked if they were hiring, and I got a job there. There I fell in love even harder with pipes, and at last had people I could talk to about them who weren't irritated. They got it, so that was cool."

Pipe smoking eventually got better for him with time and after some trial and error.

Passion Ignited

To go from working part-time where he could engage with a hobby he newly picked up to building the Smokingpipes brand and everything thereafter, passion had to be present to achieve it. "There was something intriguing about the object. I was poking around online — with what little websites there were at the time — to read everything I could that was out there on pipe-related websites." Sykes credits Bob Hamlin's website as an early resource. "It was good in those days by late '90s standards," he says. "I think I bought an Aldo Velani from him somewhere in that period."

Essentially, he didn't find his passion through the community or even the hobby early on, because he discovered that later; it was truly the objects themselves and their design that captured it. "They had this historicity to them that tied them back to an earlier era. Culturally, it was a throwback even then, and all of those things as a bundle were appealing to me. I don't know if I understood then or if that came later."

There was something intriguing about the object.

He was fascinated with the "thingness" of pipes and that sparked his love for the object. In a consumer age where anything mass manufactured can be ordered online and delivered the next day to your doorstep, without a care for who made it and how, the originality and care behind pipe making are really special to Sykes. "We've become totally separated from the goods we buy. Our lives are filled with objects now and we have so much material wealth as a society."

Three hundred years ago, anything you owned, you likely knew the person who made it. For example, a pair of shoes might have been commissioned specifically by you and you'd pay them in barter. "This was a highly personal, specialized product." It wasn't until the end of the 18th century that mass manufacturing arose with goods like ceramics made in China, and the rise of mass-manufactured ceramics in Europe, most famously pioneered by Josiah Wedgewood.

"One of the things that is remarkable about pipes is that the brand and the person who made it, or the factory that made it, are usually the same. All the artisans in pipe making are known by name. We've watched them make pipes. As a consumer, you may not know this person in person, or perhaps you've watched a video of them working, but there is a deep connection between the making of the object and the person who buys it."

The second thing about pipes that Sykes adores is that the value is in the product, not in the intellectual property. He uses the example of name-brand Legos versus knockoffs from Amazon. "The knockoffs aren't quite as well thought out, but the difference isn't much. The actual objects are very much the same, but the price difference is about fourfold. The real value is in the ecosystem IP: you're paying for not the value embedded in the thing, but for the tens of thousands of engineering hours and design time."

Pipes are physical objects that reflect the labor of the people who create them, and carry real material cost from the wood, rubber, metals, and other goods that go into making them. "There are not a lot of objects left in life that are like that, that we buy as consumers. I think that makes pipes awesome. What do I love about pipes? That."

There are not a lot of objects left in life that are like that.

Pipes and Tobacco Evolution

While working at Elliston Place, Sykes had access to a whole plethora of tobaccos and pipes to try. And that he did. "My taste in pipes shifted. I bought some corn cobs at the beginning directly from Missouri Meerschaum. I had the two pipes I mentioned earlier — the Dr. Grabow and the Aldo Velani from Bob Hamlin — which I abandoned pretty quickly in favor of the small collection my dad sent me. He had a lot of Comoy's Seconds and that kind of stuff from London that he bought in the mid-to-late '60s through the early '80s."

His first real upgrade — a pipe he believes met his standard for quality today — was a Brebbia: a smooth bent Bulldog with a neat inlay on the stem. "I understood what I was buying. It was a nice pipe. I was working at Elliston Place and it was something I had been eyeing for a while." Then, within his first few months working at the store, he bought a sandblasted Savinelli Autograph bent Billiard — on the more classic end of the Autograph line.

The third piece — of course, there could be more seminal pipes he might be leaving out — was his first serious artisanal pipe: a sandblasted Former in a bent Egg shape. Later, when he was deep into high-grade pieces, came a Nanna Ivarsson piece she gifted him in 2006, and several Hiroyuki Tokutomi pipes from 2002 through 2004.

On the tobacco side, he moved from Eckerd's generic tobaccos to buying pipe tobacco at Elliston. "I was smoking Lane Limited's 1-Q for a bit. But I really dabbled and did a lot of buying an ounce of this, an ounce of that. I was smoking mostly English mixtures at that time."

He went from Aromatics to English to Virginias — much the same pipeline that others follow. "By the time I started Smokingpipes, I was moving out of the English mixtures and into Virginias. My favorite there for a while was McClelland's Arcadia, which was never really popular. But it was a nice medium English blend."

After starting the company, Sykes even set himself a goal to smoke all the different tobaccos we sold at the time. "I had really latched on to some Kohlhase & Kopp manufactured products, like Astley's No.109, Astley's No.2, Astley's No.44, a few Rattray's blends, plus Escudo, and probably Orlik Golden Sliced somewhere in there. I went through a big Mac Baren phase as well, probably more like 2010-2014. I really liked Navy Flake, which was the one I mostly smoked."

Sykes even set himself a goal to smoke all the different tobaccos we sold at the time.

"And, of course, G.L. Pease's blends. Haddo's Delight was my go-to for years. I would smoke Stratford and Barbary Coast here and there." If he had to narrow down what he enjoyed most at that time, he notes going back and forth between Escudo and Haddo's. Then came his love for Cairo, which he was smoking at the time of our interview. "I smoke Cairo as a baseline and other things a few times a week or that I'm trying from Jeremy. I buy Cairo in eight ounce tins."

Advice for Beginners

Aside from what others have shared in their first pipe story pieces, Sykes suggests buying the best pipe that you can afford. "I abandoned the cheapest pipe I could find pretty quickly. I think I still have that Brebbia. I don't mean you have to jump all the way to Former but quality makes all the difference. Get yourself a less expensive Peterson or Savinelli. It might still seem like a lot of money, but these are durable objects that last multiple lifetimes."

These are durable objects that last multiple lifetimes.

When it comes to pipe tobacco, he suggests trying a lot of stuff. "I don't think there are any rules to pipe tobacco. When you're figuring out what you like, an ounce or two of tobacco isn't a huge financial commitment in the grand scheme of things."

He also emphasizes that pipe smoking doesn't have a lot of rules. "It's okay to be a pipe smoker and be meticulous and careful, loading your pipe and breaking it in carefully. But it's also fine being a lumberjack and smoking a pipe and sticking it in your jeans pocket."

The resources available to pipe smokers now are a lot stronger than what he had available to him when he started, so learning helps. "Practicing until you figure out what works for you is what it's about. Everybody ends up converging on a roughly same rightness. Just don't sweat it."

That's Sykes' first pipe story. I'd love to hear yours in the comments, and thank you to Sykes for sharing his back story that pre-dated the launch of Smokingpipes and the last quarter-of-a-century and beyond. If you missed our other first pipe stories, check them out right here on the Daily Reader, and let me know who else's pipe stories you'd like to read about.