Bru-Bu

Bru-Bu is the trade name, adopted after 1932, of the pipe factory founded in the village of Kleinlützel in the Swiss canton of Solothurn. Because of the BBK mark stamped on its pipes, it is most often referred to by collectors under those three letters.

Kleinlützel: A Small Village's Pipe Industry

Kleinlützel, a mountain village of a few hundred households close to the French border, became Switzerland's focal point for pipe production by the end of the 19th century. It owes this to two family businesses: the workshop the Brunner family started in 1878, and a second factory Moritz Tschan founded in 1892. The concentration of two benches in the same valley earned the village the epithet "Switzerland's Saint-Claude." The Tschan facility is open to visitors today as a pipe and cane factory museum with its machinery kept in working order; of the Brunner business, only the brand name and mark remain.

Josef Brunner's Workshop

At the root of Bru-Bu is Josef Brunner, the son of a farming family. Apprenticed to a pipe turner in Alsace in 1871, Brunner, after completing his apprenticeship, set out on the customary journeyman's travels of the era, which took him to Saint-Claude, then regarded as the world centre of briar-root pipe production. He learned industrial-scale pipemaking there.

Returning to his village in 1878, Brunner set up a lathe in his father's house and began working for himself with his two younger brothers; the first products were sold by hand at the markets of surrounding towns. The workshop's growth beyond artisan scale is tied to a mill the family inherited in 1893: once the lathes were moved to the mill's annex, they could be turned by water power. Records indicate this was followed within a decade by a separate factory building and a cane-making division drawing on the same woodworking as the pipes. It is reported that Kleinlützel's pipes returned from various exhibitions with awards, including a gold medal at the 1914 Swiss National Exhibition in Bern; this award reaches us today only through secondary sources.

Depression, Partnership, and a New Name

At the turn of the century business grew so brisk that the village could not find enough workers; to solve this a branch was opened in Laufen, though this facility did not last. The real break came during the economic depression of the 1920s and early 1930s. Large French factories in Saint-Claude, facing the same difficulties, flooded the Swiss market with cheap pipes, creating pressure the local producer could not counter. In 1931, around 150 of the 180-strong staff were laid off; the small remaining crew kept working at the Kleinlützel workshop, kept afloat by cheap electricity.

The move that kept the business alive came in 1932. A family known only by the surname Buhofer, who had made their fortune in the United States, came in as partners, and the company took the name Brunner-Buhofer-Kompagnie; this long name was soon shortened to Bru-Bu. The programme expanded along with the partnership. Alongside pipes, work drawing on wood carving — family crests, table boards, and, with every passing year, more souvenirs for tourism — gained weight. Pipes never left the programme at any point, but production drifted away from traditional Swiss shapes toward the standard moulds becoming widespread across Europe.

Closure and the Workshop's Second Life

Bru-Bu ceased operations toward the end of the 1970s; one branch of the Brunner family stayed on in the timber trade. The empty workshop produced pipes once again in 1986: through the initiative of Horst Wiethüchter, a retired tobacco-industry executive, Danish master Former began managing production here of a premium brand called Bentley. This period lasted about a decade, after which production moved to Denmark.