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Banner: Two of Steve’s favorites, his beloved 53 and his 01 System DeLuxe

This morning I’m in my full-on fanboy mode, so be prepared.  Smoke strong tobacco.  Drink strong coffee.  Throw on your best Irish kilt & don’t be afraid of the breeze—Éirinn go Brách!

Some believe the Irish invented the kilt.

I’m always in awe of everything that goes on at SPC, and when I finished up my last year’s teaching back in 2018, I was trying to think of something meaningful to engage with beyond my beloved middle schoolers.  I thought for awhile I’d apply at Smokingpipes, move to South Carolina and sweep out their warehouse until someone broke down and let me write a pipe description.  Gigi and I even looked at a few houses, as we love that area.  Then retirement came and after a few months it seemed that I had even less time than I did when I was teaching.  So the next best thing, I found, is to talk about Peterson pipes, whenever they’ll let me, to one of the good folks that work at SPC or Laudisi. And failing that, to blog about Peterson pipes!

This morning I’m really, really pleased to share a conversation I had with Steve Mawby, not only a plaid-wearing Pete Geek, but Smokingpipe’s Director of Sales.  I’ve met Steve at both the Chicago and then at the Texas Pipe Show (where he helped me acquire my Holy Grail J T Cooke Globe-grade pipe). I will not embarrass myself by telling you how many times I’ve called to ask him to look at a pipe for me.  The last time, if memory serves, I swear I heard him him strapping on a pair of roller skates just to make my calls a little less strenuous (I could hear the casters spinning).

M: Where did you grow up, Steve?

S: Just outside of Youngstown, Ohio in a little town called Niles, at the confluence of the Mahoning River and Mosquito Creek.  Niles is a suburb in the Youngstown–Warren metropolitan area.

M: How is it that you found your way down in South Carolina?

S: Like most people from Northeast Ohio, my family took vacations down to the Myrtle Beach area when I was growing up, I don’t know how it happens, but it just seems like everybody from Ohio somehow finds their way to Myrtle Beach.  So I knew the area fairly well, and when I got out of school, there weren’t a whole lot of job opportunities in the area and I didn’t want to just be hanging around a small down.  At 18, it seemed like a fate worse than death.

I spent a year in Myrtle Beach for a year, then settled in Columbia, South Carolina, where I started up a property management and real estate investment company. After awhile, I took a a look at the market and thought Myrtle Beach looked like more was going on there, so moved back to Myrtle Beach.  The business ended up not doing what I’d hoped it would, so I began to put my application out and found a place called Laudisi Enterprises.

At the time, I wasn’t even a pipe smoker.  I started to start smoking a pipe so I could talk about it with other people at work, and from working with other people in Customer Service, they’d say, “Oh, you’re getting into smoking a pipe? Try this tobacco,” or “Try that tobacco.” Their enthusiasm was infectious, so that got me into pipes—the camaraderie, the passion, the depth of knowledge they had, the pipes and the tobacco.

So you could say I ended up here by a string of lucky chances. But I’ve made Myrtle Beach my home for the past seven years and I love it here. I’ll be a Myrtle Beach Laudisian until I retire.

M: So did you begin in Customer Service at Smokingpipes?

Y: Yes I did. After nine or ten months, I became Customer Service Supervisor and at the time there were two of us, myself and Cassie Davison.  She’s awesome and she and I really work well together.  Then Cassie became Shane Ireland’s assistant (Shane is VP of Retail)—and was Assistant Director at one point—and at that time I became Customer Service Manager. Then last summer I became Director of Sales for Smokingpipes and Cassie became Director of Merchandise. Now I oversee Customer Service, Restorations, and our brick & mortar store Lowcountry, here in Little River.

M: Congrats! That’s really cool.

S: Yeah, very exciting. Challenges, but absolutely no complaints!

M: So what does your work day look like?  A lot of us on the hobby side know less than nothing about what happens on the business side, and however much it must feel very quotidian to you guys, to us it’s like looking to an exotic world—“oooohhh, pipes! tobaccos!”

S: I get to the office, get my coffee, pack my pipe—and after that, it gets a little more prosaic. LOL.  I always say that a lot of pipe collectors look at us like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory for pipes and tobaccos. And to an extent, we really are. We do have a huge warehouse and I get to go back there and get my hands on the pipes and smell the tobaccos to see what looks or smells appealing.

But then there’s the important work of  answering emails, taking phone calls from customers I work with, and–smoking my pipe!  My work could helping somebody who’s looking for a certain kind of smooth pipe made by a certain carver, or another guy who has a question about a shipping issue or something damaged in transit.  Maybe it’s someone wanting tobacco recommendations.

As far as my team goes, Customer Service is the one I’ve had most experience with—6 ½ years in that department.  They do these same kinds of things, as well as taking instant messages on the web site’s Live Chat feature. I spend a lot of time with Alan Britt, the current Assist. Manager of Customer Service, looking at the social media sites responding to posts and comments people make, as well as keeping up with what’s going on the pipe community and getting involved in those conversations. We also review comments left on the website for various products to see if there’s anything we need to respond to or any requests that are made.

Then there’s the folks (*ahem*) that will call and say, “Hey, could you go take a look at this pipe for me?”—

M: Guilty! Guilty!

S: –and that’s part of what we do.  It gives us the chance to get our hands on pipes. The last couple of years Customer Service has been in a different building from the warehouse, but that’s all changed now (see Syke’s Wilford’s recent post to the SPC Daily Blog) and we’re in the same building as the pipes.

M: This is the retail side? Where you’re dealing with individual pipe smokers?  And Laudisi Enterprises would be the side working with brick and mortar shops and internet retailers?

S: Yes, that’s correct.  Laudisi is the parent company. Under it are Smokingpipes, Smokingpipes.eu as retailers, Low Country Pipe & Cigar as brick & mortar retailer, Kapp & Peterson, Cornell & Diehl, and most recently Caldwell Cigar. Then there’s Laudisi Distribution Group. They do wholesaling for Peterson, Savinelli, Rossi Pipes, Koribi Lighters and a couple of other folks.

M: I know that not everybody who goes to work for SPC is a pipe smoker beforehand, or even become one.  It’s interesting to meet someone who had never really thought about pipes and tobaccos before, joined SPC and then fell head over heels in love with the culture and embraced pipe smoking as a hobby. You obviously did! Very few of us have an origin story like yours.

S: Right. Most people I know had a grandfather or father, a mentor, or read about it in books at a younger age and took it up.  I sort of fell into it backwards, and you’re right, not everybody comes in and is converted to the lifestyle. And even when you don’t, SPC is still a great company to work for.  I’ve pulled into the parking lot of jobs in my life where I sat out there for a minutes before my shift started and said to myself, “Just how badly do I need to go in there?—LOL.”  Not here.  The management is very supportive.

M: It’s always seemed like a magic place to me.  I remember watching how Sykes assembled this team of enormous talent from very non-business backgrounds.  Like Josh Burgess with his PhD in American history.  Or Sykes himself, with his master’s degree in history.  I loved how in the early years SPC would share its company Christmas celebrations or annual picnics on the blog. I really looked forward to Sykes’s first post on the blog of the New Year, where he’d talk about the company’s past year as well as trends in the hobby and what the industry side was doing.  In fact, it reminds me of how Kapp & Peterson were with their annual Christmas dinners and summer “Bean feasts” (picnics followed by a company dance).

S: Yes, the big Christmas parties and spring events are still a big thing around here, where Shane, Adam Davidson, Josh slow cook brisket and everyone brings desserts and that kind of thing. We all go to a minor league baseball game every spring. We also have our own pipe club at Low Country Pipe & Cigar where we get together and do crazy things like play Trivia but with pipe and tobacco questions. It got harder with COVID and our rapid growth as a company has also slowed things down a bit, but it’s there.

M: Is it difficult working in customer service?

S: I’ve worked in other customer service situations. You know, no one probably calls a cell phone company’s customer service to do anything but complain.  But most pipe smokers seem to be calm, level-headed, kind people.  Sure, not everybody.  And sometimes there’s an issue that needs to be taken care of us.  But the hobby seems to attract really great people, which makes customer service much easier from our end.  I’m actually amazed by the number of wonderful people I meet from one end of the week to the other.

M: Let’s circle back to your origin story now that most of us are insanely jealous of your workplace—and I didn’t even tell them your office was on the 2^nd floor of Low Country until last summer!—tell us about your first pipe and tobacco experiences.

S: My first pipe was given to me by Shane Ireland. It was a Ropp bulldog. I used to joke with Shane about it, because you’ve probably heard that in the old days of brick & mortar shops, the owner would sometimes recommend you buy a pipe that looks like your facial shape.  And so I said, “What, are you saying I have the face of a bulldog?”—LOL. But it’s a good little smoker.

Then I had a Chacom, a Comoy’s and a few others, and I enjoyed them.  Mostly I was just experimenting with tobaccos. The first pipe I ever saw and said, “Wow, I’m exciting about this pipe,” was a smooth Peterson Aran 53.  I wish I could tell you a great story about it, but I just saw it and fell for it.

Since then I’ve just enjoyed Petersons and find myself going back to them.  I love their aesthetic, their classic shapes.  Just kind of enjoyed Peterson’s and gone back to him. I love the aesthetic. [00:04:53] You know, I love their their classic shapes [00:04:57] and yeah, I just I love everything about him and

M: In your rotation of Petes, are there any other shapes that are favorites?

The Favorite Five from Steve’s Pete Rotation

S: I have two 53s, a Terracotta Baker Street (because I’m a sucker for a bulldog). I’ve got a Barley 150 Spigot, a Junior Apple, an 03. Right now I’m smoking a 2023 Pipe of the Year, which is probably my most heavily-smoked pipe.

M: I was so impressed with that pipe. It was beautiful—of course. It was a classic shape from the 1906 catalog. But it was an army mount and I really didn’t know how it would work for me, because generally I have a lot of trouble with that kind of pipe. Turbulence, heat, all the rest. But after a few puffs my first thought was, “How did Giacomo Penzo and his team do this?” And my second thought was, “I wonder if I can find another one or if they’re already sold out?”

Since you’re a bull dog lover, were you at all tempted by the 2024 POY? Admittedly it’s a bent rhodesian, but those double beads still give off a bit of the bulldog bark.

S: I got my hands on a few of those, and everything about them is really fine.  I won’t say how much of my paycheck I ended giving back to my employer.

M: You know, I’ve always wondered about that. It doesn’t seem fair that you should have to pay for your pipes and tobaccos.  Doesn’t that come up at employee complaint meetings? The discount’s nice, but free is even better, right?  How else can you endorse the product if you don’t smoke it?

S: LOL.  I’m not starved for new tobacco. Everybody here is very, very generous.

M: Speaking of which, we haven’t talked about tobaccos yet.  What are your favorite styles and blends?

S: I try a bit of everything. I tend a little toward virginia, va/per, burley blends.  I’m a big fan of the Rattray’s virginia stuff—Hal ’O the Wynd, for example.  I like Samuel Gawith’s stuff.  I have a bit of a reputation around the office because I like to smoke Black Irish X and Brown Irish X and Bogie Twist. I like the high-kick stuff more than most people, I guess. Right now I’m smoking C&D’s 2023 Anthology, one of my all-time favorites.  With the heat and the humidity, things like Latakia don’t appeal to me in the summer here in South Carolina. In the fall and winter is when I’ll turn to those.

M: With your years in the business side of pipes and tobaccos, what do you happening in the future?  I know numbers are difficult to talk about, but I often feel there’s reticence to talk about what’s going on those on the hobby side. Can you speak to that? Do you think the hobby is growing? Growing smaller? Larger?

S: What I’ve seen over the past few years, and what I think everybody at Laudisi sees, is growth.  We’ve seen an increase in the number of people who’re smoking a pipe.  We’ve seen an increase—although it’s hard for me to put a number on this—but I talk to a lot customers customers who say they’re just getting into it for the first time, or they used to smoke a pipe, took a hiatus, and are returning to it. We see a lot of engagement on social media. It’s definitely been expanding over the past few years.

M: That’s good news, Steve.  Really good news.

One final question: you claim have been a lumberjack.  You look like a lumberjack. I know plaid flannels are your favorite shirts, but true confession: have you ever really done any lumberjacking?

S: LOL. You’ll rarely see me without a plaid shirt on. Yes, actually, I did forestry (don’t call it “lumberjacking”—puhleese).  It was one of the first jobs I had, back when I was 18 or 19. I did it for a few months, then my company started downsizing.  Then I went to another company doing residential tree removal.

M: Okay. Just fact-checking the SPC website.  All’s good–unless, would you see if maybe Smokingpipes could carry a line of Irish county kilts? Plaid shirts in Irish tartans? Flat caps? A muffler?

S: I’ll pass that along, Mark!

Stephen, thanks so much for taking this time to share out with all the Pete Geeks.  I so appreciate all you do for us as pipe smokers!

Thanks to the great SPC photographer
and to Steve!

Jacob Verstrate CPG

Nate Lynn CPG

Walt Moultrie CPG

Martin Kollman CPG

Evan Swinington CPG

Gary Hamilton CPG

Raphaël Foesser CPG

Eric Rynder CPG
(Eric is in the back row, second from left)