Goblins do Facebook

Biz News - I've posted several new pipes to the site in the past couple of days, including some new Ligne Bretagnes (including one Collector-grade poker) and this October's first Goblins. More will be arriving very soon!

Today's photo is a sneak preview pic of the next Goblin that will be hitting the catalog in a day or two. I'm trying to schedule the work on them in sync so I can post a few at a time together, but so far am not having much luck with it, and always seem to have one that's near done and three others that still need work. They'll be going up from now until Halloween, though, so watch the Goblin catalog page for new postings.

Rollicking times these days, eh? I'm sure that like most artisan pipemakers now, we're crossing our fingers and hoping we can make it through this current economic crisis, that always seems to hit the little people the hardest while the Wall Street crowd float away on their golden parachutes. All I can do is give a heartfelt plea to all the pipe folks out there to please help support our artisan community now, as best you're able, because times are most certainly tough. I suspect we'll be seeing more than a few makers pull out of the biz for better pastures in the weeks and months to come.

But in other ways, the wretched state of the world economy has actually helped us - after years of being abnormally high compared to the devalued USD, the euro has finally started to fall a good bit, making our pipes MUCH more friendly in pricing to US collectors. What was $628+ only a few months ago is now $540, a whopping savings! The change is all the way through the lines - even the Ligne Bretagnes benefit with USD costs falling from $190 to $160 or less. So, hooray for falling currency values ;) I hope we'll be able to stir up some more (and new) business in the states again soon, after virtually having to abandon the market there for lack of pricing flexibility due to the high euro. I'll be happy if we can - While I'm pleased that our market is now much more worldwide, with collectors all over the globe, the US is still near and dear to my heart and it's been intensely frustrating being at such a competitive disadvantage. I've always prided myself on making a damned good pipe for the money at every price level we sell in, and having the table stacked against me has not been fun.

Finally, a few of you had some early warning that Goblins were about to be posted if you were following my Facebook profile. Facebook has apparently exploded with activity affecting me in the past month - I've had an account on there for about a year now, and there was NOBODY on there that I knew. It seemed like a completely pointless exercise, and I never bothered to update my profile or keep track of it. Now, suddenly, it seems that my entire high school has joined and all started contacting me, plus numerous pipe folks (making for an eclectic group of friends to be sure!). Due to this activity, I finally went in and added photos to my profile, and have started actively updating it. So, if you're interested in what we're up to here at Ye Olde Talbert Workshop, just add me as a friend on Facebook and you can follow up-to-the-minute notices on what's happening. Of course, there's a fair bit of ordinary life stuff mixed with the pipe stuff, but curious parties can see a bit of Brittany, some of the places we've been, and even follow what I'm reading now via my profile's "Virtual Bookshelf", where I'll be posting my own reviews of my daily reading.