Hasso Baudis

Hasso Baudis was a German master who became known in northern Germany in the late 1970s and who abandoned the craft entirely after sustaining full-time pipe making for only around five years. Despite the brevity of his career, his name is still cited when describing the young generation of masters taking shape in West Germany in those years.

The Workshop's Short Life

Production is thought to have begun in 1977, while Baudis was still a university student. His pipes are said to have first gone on sale at a Hamburg tobacconist; this detail rests solely on the pipe community's own accounts. As his renown grew, he is said to have established a working relationship with the firm Tuxedo, which handled German distribution for brands such as Dunhill and Stanwell; this collaboration, along with a feature said to have appeared in a 1981 German pipe magazine, has not been confirmed by independent sources.

The workshop closed in 1983. Baudis left his Oldenburg bench to architect and designer Robert Mewis, who had learned pipe making from him, and returned himself to his original profession of architecture. Mewis continued production until the late 1980s before making the same choice and also moving into architecture. Why Baudis stepped away so early was never explained.