Laudisi Enterprises Company

In 1999, Sykes Wilford found himself working part time at a tobacconist in Nashville, Tennessee, while he was in college. He had been smoking a pipe for a few months and it seemed like it'd be a fun place to work. Moreover, it was close to campus, which was a really important feature given he didn't have a car. The store, like most tobacconists, mostly sold cigars, but he fell in love with the pipes and the pipe tobacco. Cigars were a lot of fun too, but pipes were permanent things of beauty and the sheer variety of pipe tobacco kept him coming back.

What really struck him, though, is that in the late 1990s, these guys had an electronic cash register and did inventory with pen and paper. After a particularly unpleasant four-hour session adding up handwritten columns of numbers on green ledger paper—thirteenth-century Venice style—it became apparent that the pipe world needed technology. And it needed it badly.

This was the late 1990s. Internet startups were the cool thing to do. Undeterred by his lack of technology or business background, Sykes founded Laudisi Enterprises in June, 2000 and Smokingpipes.com sold its first pipe in November, 2000.

The first couple of years were slow-going. Sykes was increasingly realizing that he really didn't know much of anything about business and his intimate knowledge of medieval European history and 20th century Southern lit just wasn't helping much. But, by the end of 2002, he'd graduated and business was starting to look promising. Smokingpipes.com did $15,000 in revenue in November, 2002. At the time, that seemed like a lot. As of this writing, $15,000 is a very weak Tuesday.

We moved the business in 2003 to a mouse-infested 1,200 sq ft workshop with minimal heating in Longs, SC. We obviously still didn't really know what we were doing, but it was cheap and we needed some space, so we were there for two years. We grew extremely rapidly, growing more than six-fold in two years and almost ten-fold in the three years between 2002 and 2005.

In January 2005, we moved into the 5,000 sq ft brick building at the corner of Hwy 90 and Sea Mountain that currently houses Low Country Pipe & Cigar on the ground floor, the company's workshop on the third floor and some of our offices in between.

Growth continued at a good clip, ranging between 12.5% and 25% per annum from 2006 to 2012. We steadily went from being a high end boutique emphasizing high grade Japanese and Danish pipes to being the dominant player in the premium pipe and pipe tobacco segment in the United States. We grew and evolved during this period, expanding into nearby buildings and growing the team from thirteen to more than forty.

In 2012, we were approached by Savinelli, perhaps the largest manufacturer of premium pipes in the world, to take over as their US distributor. We set up Laudisi Distribution Group and began distributing Savinelli pipes and other products in October of that year.

In 2014 Laudisi Enterprises merged with Cornell & Diehl, a Morganton, NC based manufacturer of boutique, hand-blended pipe tobacco. C&D in its present incarnation was founded in 1990, however, the company's roots and heritage began in the 1880's in New York as The Atlas

Blending Co. From the very beginning, the company flew somewhat in the face of convention, just like Laudisi. And so naturally it’s been a successful fit.

And so in September of 2014, as we once again outgrew our digs on account of all the new jobs we’ve added to Laudisi so that we could continue to kick butt and take names, and because we needed to move C&D down from Morganton so that we could all be in the same work area, we moved the whole company to a giant 30,000 sq. ft. facility in Longs, SC, about six miles away from our old home. But the store has stayed put, thankfully.

It's an exciting time to be here. We're growing extremely rapidly right now. Between Smokingpipes.com's and Low Country Pipe & Cigar's organic growth and the addition of LDG and C&D, we’re facing continuous growth annually. It's a dynamic, constantly evolving atmosphere.