496. “A Defining Moment”: The 160th Peterson / 25th Smokingpipes Anniversary Pipes
THE DROPS Smokingpipes.com: Monday, December 15 (6:00pm ET) Smokingpipes Europe: Monday, December 15 (Dublin, 10am / GMT+0) (Per Federica Bruno: “There will be a small selection of 9mm available on SPE.”) Dropping next week--Monday the 15th--are the 160th Peterson and 25th Smokingpipes Anniversary pipes. They will be sold separately in a series of 2400 numbered pipes for each shape, or as a cased set with matching numbers in a a series of 75. Next Sunday we'll dive into the available styles, finishes, and other details of the Pat B and Pat OB pipes, but before doing so I have something special to share with you: a visit with Sykes Wilford, Josh Burgess, and Glen Whelan from the Deansgrange factory about how the 160th Anniversary pipes came about and their importance as a milestone in the company's history and Laudisi's direction. “2025 actually marks two anniversaries,” Josh Burgess at SPC told me. “For K&P, it's our 160th. For SPC, it's the 25th. This release actually pays tribute to both. We wanted to revive the Pat B and Pat OB to commemorate Peterson’s anniversary, then do something special for SPC's 25th as well, hence the two pipe sets that are exclusively available at Smokingpipes.” ARRIVING AT THIS MOMENT Putting on my journalist's hat, I led off by asking what has led each of them to this moment? In other words, what’s the motivating force behind their work? In religious circles, I said, we call this vocation, from the Latin, vocare or “calling.” Sykes, with the gleam that always comes into his eyes when talking about pipes, said when he was a kid Legos mesmerized him: “I’ve always loved to build things, and owning Peterson is like having the biggest Lego set in the world.” Being Sykes, this is to be understood on simultaneous levels. For the kid in him, there’s the love of just being in the factory and making things for himself. He’s spent a number of hours at the blasting cabinet, for example, can blast beauties like these: System Sandblasts by Sykes But he’s also talking about building Smokingpipes and Laudisi Enterprises, being part of the Dotcom Bubble of the late 1990s, when the internet revolutionized the business world. He was there with the best of them, either in his garage or a rented outbuilding (I don’t recall which), putting up what has become the world’s largest and most amazing pipes and tobacco online retailer. “I bought Peterson,” Sykes says, “and knew I would pretty much from the moment I got the call from Conor Palmer in early 2018--because it needed buying. No one else would have. And in the very unlikely event someone else did, they'd have trashed it (like strip the brand out of the factory, close the factory, move production to Italy or China, trashed it). Whether it was a good business decision or not is a question I think we're still answering. The fact that pipe factories, as businesses, are just fascinating is undeniable, but…