Stich

Stich is a Swiss pipe workshop founded in 1941 in Kleinlützel, a village in the canton of Solothurn on the French Jura border. For roughly seventy years it produced both regional traditional Swiss pipes and modern hand-shaped forms; following a fire in 2008 it closed its pipe division entirely and continued on as a woodturning and wood design workshop.

The Kleinlützel Context

Understanding Stich requires first understanding the village. From the late nineteenth century, Kleinlützel became a center for pipe and cane manufacturing, at one point home to three factories at once that supplied nearly all of Switzerland's pipe needs. The oldest of these were the Tschan workshop, founded by Moritz Tschan in 1892, and the Bru-Bu facility of the Brunner & Buholzer partnership, which opened a year later; the latter long remained the village's largest employer. Stich is the third link to follow these two.

Founding

In 1940-41, a dispute arose between Bru-Bu's management and a group of its employees, ending in the parties' separation. Choosing to start their own business rather than be left without work, the Stich brothers and their sons, said to be a family group of seven, raised capital of 21,000 Swiss francs and founded a cooperative in 1941 under the name Pfeifengenossenschaft Stich Söhne. The workshop employed ten people in its first year; in a period when the war had disrupted the flow of raw materials, it produced pipes exclusively.