Massis Pipes

Massis Pipes is the one-man pipe workshop of Nick Ramaekers, working in Belgium's Limburg province. Ramaekers has been making pipes since 2011; what sets the brand apart is not a production line but a deliberately small scale. Ramaekers states in his own promotional text that he finishes only a few pipes a year, taking craftsmanship rather than quantity as his measure.

The Workshop's Founding

Ramaekers does not come from a pipe-making background professionally. His training is in IT; he learned woodworking not from a master but on his own. By his own account, he began pipe making in 2011, ran his first experiments on ready-made pipe kits, and developed his bench and hand tools step by step in the following years. The workshop never turned into a full-time business: Ramaekers says he can only give pipes the hours left over from work and family life, which is also the main reason annual output has stayed so low.