Pinocchio Pipe

Pinocchio Pipe is the registered sub-brand of Cafe Artin, a pipe and tobacco business founded in Tehran in 2005. Records indicate it was set up in 2010 as a separate company in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, and run by the business's owner, Artin Abrahamian.

Rather than being one of the signature workshops a single carver founds under his own name, Pinocchio belongs to the more contemporary type of organization that keeps brand management in one country and has the woodworking done in another.

Brand Structure and Production

The brand's administrative center is in Yerevan, while the pipes themselves are shaped by a craftsman named Marco in Italy's Varese region. Located north of Milan, Varese is one of the historic centers of concentration for Italian pipe making, and the small workshops of the area have been producing bodies and parts for other brands as well for decades. The wood Pinocchio uses is briar, obtained from the root burl of the tree heath (Erica arborea) that grows around the Mediterranean basin. The catalog is graded largely by the grain and blemish quality of this root; as a result, the same shape appears in a considerable number of quality tiers side by side.

The shape repertoire rests largely on classic pipe shapes; what the brand highlights in its own promotion is reworking traditional silhouettes through a contemporary design language. According to records, the products are distributed to a range of countries rather than staying confined to a single region.