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Twenty-five years ago this year, I founded Smokingpipes. I was quite certain that I really liked pipes, the 2000 dot-com bubble was in full swing, and I thought that maybe at least some folks might actually buy pipes on the internet.
I was working part-time in 1999 at a long-since-closed pipe and cigar store, Elliston Place Pipe & Tobacco. It was walking distance from my dorm room at Vanderbilt in Nashville, TN. I'd been a pipe smoker for a short time, but my love affair with pipes and pipe tobacco truly began while helping customers select pipes and pipe tobacco a few afternoons a week.
Still a student and a few weeks shy of my 20th birthday, I registered the Smokingpipes.com domain and incorporated Laudisi Enterprises, Inc. I started piecing together Smokingpipes v1, and the wider offline pipe world thought I was nuts. No one, they said, would ever buy a pipe on the internet. I'd like to lay claim to some sort of prescient business insight, and perhaps there was a little there, but mostly I just thought pipes were fascinating, and the web at the time was fascinating, and I wanted to play with these things. I was very good at ignoring good advice.
In November 2000, Smokingpipes sold its first pipe.
A quarter century later, Laudisi now comprises a number of related businesses added or acquired over the years: Laudisi Distribution Group (set up in 2012, initially just as Savinell's official U.S. importer and distributor), Cornell & Diehl (acquired in early 2014, following the passing of my good friend Craig Tarler), Kapp & Peterson, Ltd. (acquired in 2018), and Caldwell Cigar Co. (merged into Laudisi in 2024). Along the way, we added two retail locations — Low Country Pipe & Cigar in Little River, SC, and the Peterson of Dublin shop on Nassau St. in Dublin, Ireland — and we founded a European online retail outpost with Smokingpipes.eu. But Smokingpipes — the business I built from scratch with technology that now feels as remote as stone axes and jawbone scrapers — has steadily grown and flourished over the years and remains central to it all.
A quarter-century is a big deal, so we're celebrating with a series of projects with longtime friends and partners, as we did in 2020 for our 20th Anniversary. We're collaborating with friends at factories and workshops to create special, limited-edition pipes and pipe tobaccos (and maybe some other fun things) to celebrate our 25th anniversary. The projects will vary in size and type, but each will represent the best of what's possible when passionate, enthusiastic people work together.
Our first entrant in this year's series of projects comes from Savinelli. Smokingpipes has carried Savinelli pipes from the beginning. Laudisi, as a company, and I, personally, have developed a deep collaborative relationship with Savinelli in the years since we became their U.S. importer and distributor. I've visited Savinelli two or three times every year for the past dozen years, working closely with them on pipe development.
Sonia Rivolta, along with Savinelli's CEO, Eduardo Casale, Savinelli's factory manager, and I worked out the concept in January of last year. I wanted to work very much within Savinelli's traditional aesthetic lexicon but not within the main shape chart. We settled on a stunning long-shanked tall bent Billiard. Referencing the mount they used for occasional special projects, we opted for a heavy sterling silver army mount, accented with the Smokingpipes logo on a sterling rondelle. Completing it — and referencing the pipe Savinelli made for Smokingpipes on its 20th anniversary — we opted for a red Smokingpipes push army-mount stem.
Just 75 of these special pipes were made. I hope you enjoy them.
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Comments
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Congratulations Sykes and the entire, outstanding crew at Smoking Pipes on reaching this important milestone. You must have done a lot of things right and very few things wrong to have survived and thrived for a quarter century. Thank you for your contribution to the pipe smoking world. Long may you prosper.
Congrats Sykes and everyone that has worked at the premier online tobacco shop. Hands down, the best out there!!
To another 25 years gang!!!
Damn!!! Sykes, you have done it again! Your 25th Anniversary pipes are wonderful. I have to admit that I'm partial to the full-bent billiards, but you have hit the next level... I'm not sure if there is a level higher. ;-)
Damn!!! Sykes, you have done it again! Your 25th Anniversary pipes are wonderful. I have to admit that I'm partial to the full-bent billiards, but you have hit the next level... I'm not sure if there is a level higher. ;-)
Congratulations and best wishes, so glad I found you, I was unable to obtain a decent tobacco products for quite some time until I found your website. Thanks and wishing you 25 more.
A great article that could have been a (well-deserved) victory lap but instead gives a glimpse of what might not have been.
Also, “I was working part-time in 1999” is a great cross between the opening line of one Prince song and the chorus to another (bonus points to anyone who can name both).
Raspberry Beret and 1999.