CHARATAN’S Make Perfection 3

England, 1960s

Once at the time of wild capitalism in the Wild West one businessman decided to decorate his “market” with an advertising. He chose an advertising slogan “Buy only from John!” without any deep philosophizing, set it up over the  shop and went to sleep and dream huge profits. But in the morning Mr. John found out that the world is not such a simple and predicted as it was wanted or seemed.

The sign “… If you didn’t find these goods at Jim!” was mounted this night over the shop of his competitor in the neighborhood. So, John and Jim (without suspecting that) demonstrated two basic approaches to the advertising: it is necessary either to ennoble itself (the goods), or to humiliate the competitor (goods of the competitor).

Another interesting example was given by Hermann Lane’s guys from Charatan’s. Do you remember which grain is at Dunhill Root Briar pipes? Yes, it’s generally nice but in fact it’s just a cross grain: stripes – eyes – stripes and once again eyes. They aren’t straight grain and don’t have excessive birds eyes. Surely the quality of briar and pipes themselves is really good. OK, said guys from Charatan. You’re talking about excellent and even perfect Dunhill pipes. No problem, but here you are: it’s a Charatan’s perfection pipe, “killer of Dunhill”. It’s at least of the same good quality and it has at least the same cross grain. But since we have a lot of different grades usually of a substantially better quality this Charatan’s Perfection will be one of the beginning grades, exactly over the Charatan’s Belvedere. In other words we compete the top grade Dunhill pipe with definitely not the most expensive and not the most beautiful pipe of ours.

We would call it “a trolling” today 🙂

And we have here for your attention one of such “killers of Dunhill” – very lightly smoked, amazing cross grain and very unusual shape. At least it doesn’t need any pipe rest or holder. The pipe markings are “CHARATAN’S MAKE \ LONDON ENGLAND \ PERFECTION”, “3”. The length is 13.8 cm, bowl’s hight is 4.2 cm. External and internal diameters of the bowl are 4.1 cm and 2.2 cm. The depth is 3.4 cm and this pipe weights 44 gr. Briar, vulcanite stem, no filter.