Grading part 3 - Where does it come from?

Biz Stuff - There are a few new additions to the website. The Ligne Bretagne catalog is no longer all sold out, as I've just added two new pipes, and there were three new Talbert Briars also... alas, two of them sold immediately, but there's still a quite nice natural-finish sandblast available. Full info can be found on the News page.

Today's pipe photo is what you get when you create a multi-exposure of all of the 2005 Talbert Halloween pipe photos. Creepy. Could this be foreshadowing? I'll never say.

So, to continue on with the grading discussion - Where does it come from? I've already talked about why grades exist and the problems with grading, but haven't yet addressed just how these numbers and stamps are chosen. There's a good reason for this - Namely, that pipe collectors probably don't really want to know just how arbitrary the application of grades can be!

How many times are Ebay pipes described as "undergraded"? Isn't it interesting that none are ever "overgraded"? Where do we get these numbers? Aren't continual hypothetical questions annoying? But seriously... Grading scales don't emerge fully mature and perfect from the Elysium Fields; rather, they birth like vaguely-formed amoeba and mutate over the course of their lives to encompass all sorts of mutually exclusive ideas until eventually their whole framework collapses under the weight of their obfuscation. Some collectors absolutely love this - They live for the collection of trivia, and shiver in anticipation of each new nugget of information to add to their Total Pipe Trivia Package - an encyclopedic knowledge of strange stamps and limited editions that the makers themselves have long forgotten.

I got my grading setup in a very typical way. I started out with a simple division of smooths and sandblasts, and then learned very quickly that not all pipes are created equal in terms of grain, and prices must reflect this. Thus, the grading scale of 1 to 5 was born. All pipemakers like to have some sort of super ultra-high grade as well, and thus I dreamed up my M grade. This was fine for a while. It rapidly became apparent, however, that some of the shapes I like to carve were just too labor-intensive for my standard prices. How to price a complex shape with decent grain versus a simple shape with exceptional grain? Obviously, I needed a whole new grading scale to compensate for pipes with extra hours in them, so I created the Signature grade. And, of course, there are the limited edition pipes, the Talbert Yule pipes and Halloween pipes floating around. I'm just one guy and this is already overcomplicated, so one can see how people write entire books around deciphering Dunhill stamping.

But... HOW are grades assigned? Everyone has different methods. Some actually count sandspots and rank accordingly (A method for the masochistic, as someone is almost certain to eventually find a miscount and pitch a fit), some rank by grain quality, by size, etc. All of these methods have their weak points - Does incredibly stunning grain make a pipe with several sandpits worth more than a pipe with OK grain but a perfectly flawless surface? It's hard to lay the laws down in stone, and at this point we get vague, because I can say definitely that in the course of my career I have both undergraded and overgraded pipes. But that latter didn't arise from greed or cackling malice - instead, the rare times it's happened were usually just from mood. One finishes a difficult pipe and it comes out much better than anticipated. One is in a really good mood about this, very enthused, and thinks, "Yes, this is definitely a grade X". Then later, looking back more objectively, one thinks, "Hmm, that probably should have been one rank lower after all."

Much more common is undergrading, the case where you just can't decide what grade a pipe should be. My norm is to round down, which is to say, when I just can't quite decide, I mark the pipe to the lower of the grades in question. Such is the case with the natural Talbert blast in the catalog right now. A lot of people will automatically grade anything that can be left unstained at their highest, and that's a very nice pipe, but I wish the blasting could have been a bit deeper... I wish the briar had been a little more cooperative, and not quite so rock hard (A common problem with extremely old blocks). Ergo, I settled on a grade 3 instead of 4.

The key point here is that grades are based on some pretty vague keystones - the emotion of the moment (People with stamps are still only human), the enthusiasm for a particular piece, and a generalized set of guidelines for how the pipes are stepped. All pipemakers do their best to be as consistent as possible, but the reality is that sometimes it's just a roll of the dice that separates 300 € from 400 €.

Next time I'm going to talk about what's good about grading...!

Oh, and in case anyone is curious, I grade Talbert Sandblasts by the following exacting criteria:

1 - I don't make them because no one wants to buy them.

2 - The catch-all grade for good, well-crafted pipes that don't have really outstanding features of one sort or another (grain, usually).

3 - Excellent pipes with really nice grain, fun shapes, etc... Just overall what I think of as "better than usual". Any natural finish is automatically a grade 3 at least.

4 - Stunners. The pipes that you HAVE to have, that are just really exceptional looking. Grain, shape, over all, the best.

5 - A virtually mythical grade never produced in normal work. This is reserved for the sandblasts that I can't believe even exist - combinations of striking shape and amazing grain that would inspire even me to spend 700 € on one, and that's saying something.

So, there's my own grading breakdown in a nutshell! Highly technical, eh?

Another Intermission - Digital Art

My recent graphical work on the computer caused me to stumble over a previously-unknown (to me) feature of Google's Picasa - the ability to create multi-exposure pictures. One simply chooses the photos to combine, and Picasa melds them seamlessly into one image of shared exposure. This is a fun toy, and it led me to wonder what sorts of modern digital art I could create via multi-exposing some of my photo collections. This is the first multi-exposure of a set of pipe photos, the Talbert Briars and Mortas of 2003. It's a neat effect.

Following on from that, here are some images of France from our travel photos. It's interesting how each collection of (sometimes fifty or more) photos of the different locales lends each place a distinctly unique character in the final image.

The beach and coastline of Quimiac, not far from here, where we enjoy taking picnic lunches in the summer:



The stone, grey, ancient Breton riverside port of La Roche-Bernard, a short ten minute drive to our north:



The city of Nantes, in its somewhat nervous glory:



And, finally, our village of Herbignac in autumn:



Next post is back to grading again!

Why have Grading? Pt. 2 - The Cons

Biz Stuff - Big update today! The full story can be found on the News page, but in brief, there is one new Talbert Briar (pictured left), three new Talbert Mortas, and one new Ligne Bretagne Collector. Alas, as I write this, both the TB and the LB have already been sold. However, there is a surprise bit of news - There will be a selection of Talbert Briars and Ligne Bretagnes at the Chicago show after all! P&P friend Robert Lawing is apparently taking some of Pipe & Pint's stock to the show to display on his table, so stop by and say hello, if you can find him. For the home-bound in search of my pipes, there are also two currently posted on Ebay, a morta brandyglass and a morta pot.

So, to get back to my ongoing ruminations - Why have grading? I'm going to devote this post to the cons of grading, and use the next one to discuss the pros. We'll see which ends up on top...

Grading, at its heart, is simply an artificial method of loss-leader price fixing. If the pipes in a line were all the same price, buyers would simply cherry-pick the best examples and the rest would go unsold while buyers waited for new cherries to arrive, unwilling to pay the same prices for less desirable pieces. Obviously, makers can't afford this - We need to sell as large a percentage of what we make as possible, which brings the question of how to gently nudge buyers into buying the less desirable pieces. Here we have grading entering the picture - "Yes, that perfect straight grain billiard is a high grade and costs 550 €, instead of the 324 € of the less striking version." The idea is to start spreading the prices out to snag a larger proportion of buyers, but this doesn't always work the way it should.

A pipemaker (I can't recall who - Edwards?) in a past issue of P&T summed it up best when he stated, "We used to have a grading system but we stopped it because everyone just wanted to buy the high grades". This is a very real problem! Because, at its heart, the situation becomes ludicrous - If you know your high grades will all sell quickly while the lower grades sit, there's no incentive to make the lower grades. I get this to some extent - In many cases, it is actually cheaper for me to discard a pipe that would have been a grade 1 or 2, and go on to find a better block, than it is to actually invest the time and labor into finishing the pipe. Once you hit 300 € or more, nobody wants "average". The irony is that the high grades BECOME the average - Suppose for example that I produce nothing but grade 3+ pipes... Are they actually higher grades, or have they just become the new average?

Too, grading scales are insane. Really. I'm a one-man (and one-woman) shop and between my lines, I have five different kinds of grading in Talbert Briars (with five levels each), two different grading levels in mortas, and no less than eleven different grading steps in Ligne Bretagnes..... and by comparison to some, this is simple!! "Grading bloat", like waistline spread, seems to be an inevitable process that occurs gradually over a maker's career as various unusual projects come along that require some new way of thinking and pricing, until eventually you're looking at an entire drawer full of stamps of logos, dots, stars, moons, snails, birds, fish, numbers, and cartoon characters. It really does get ridiculous, and what does it all mean? Is a grade 3, two star fish better or worse than a grade four, one star owl, and how do both relate to the non-numbered five-starred pipes stamped with Speedy Gonzales?

Collectors like to believe that grading gives a measure for a pipe's relative value, especially at resell, but I haven't seen this to be the case - Resell prices tend much more to be influenced by the popularity of a maker's name, how "hot" a brand is at the moment, and just how much someone likes the pipe in question.

I don't think too many Ebay buyers are calculating, "Ahh, that 3 dot Kervorkian has the special WAKKA stamping, meaning it cost exactly $475 when it was made in 1994, which I can determine by deciphering the date coding 785BN427HEMI using Pi. Therefore, proper estate value should be exactly $240 in good condition."
I do think buyers are more often thinking, "OOO, a Kervorkian!! I like/hate it and I'll pay/not pay whatever the asking price is."

The bottom line for a maker is, unless your grading system is simple, which most are not (witness moi), NOBODY CARES. At the end of the day, buyers want a really nice example of your work. When it reaches the point where a maker is tossing out pieces that would have become low grades in favor of only creating higher grade pipes, is there really any point to having grades anymore? Why not simply say, "My pipes cost between 350 and 600 € based solely on how cool they are", and leave it at that? Or to paraphrase a friend of mine, when asked why a certain pipe was a certain grade, "That pipe is that grade because it took three days of work to make, and that's the salary I need to make for three days' work".

This is getting longer than anticipated - More to come in the next article, same Pipe-time, same Pipe-channel!