Karl Erik

Karl Erik is the pipe brand Danish maker Karl Erik Ottendahl (1942-2004) built from his two given names. The Danish School usually brings to mind pieces made in small numbers, one-off and expensive; Ottendahl set his goal at the exact opposite and tried to turn the freehand pipe into a product a moderate-income smoker could afford. In doing so he built a distinctive system that did not conceal bench assistance, while leaving the final shaping to the hand. A production life spanning nearly forty years encompassed both a fifteen-person factory and a one-man workshop.

From Aalborg to Nairobi

Ottendahl was born in Aalborg, in the north of the Jutland peninsula. He encountered pipes at fourteen; after finishing school he began an apprenticeship in lithography at sixteen. Carving pipes was, in these years, a leisure pursuit; most of his early pieces were given as gifts to senior masters at his workplace. In 1962 he went to Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, to continue his trade; unable to find a pipe he liked there, he met his own need by hand. When he returned to his country three years later, lithography was not providing him enough income, so he began selling a few pipes to boost his earnings. He gave these pieces his two given names and stamped them with the letters "KE." When a few of Copenhagen's major tobacconists took the pipes onto their shelves, the direction of the business changed: Ottendahl acquired better lathes and moved into the trade full time. The brand's beginning is generally placed in the records at the mid-1960s.

Production Shared Between Lathe and Hand

As demand grew, a move to a larger space took place around 1967-68, and the first employees were hired. The real leap came through the relationship established with the New York-based Wally Frank Ltd.; the importer was looking for affordable freehand and fantasy pipes of Danish workmanship that could fit alongside the reasonably priced products in its catalog, without any compromise on craftsmanship. The workshop eventually grew to as many as fifteen people, production was divided into stages, and each craftsman specialized in a particular task. Bent Nielsen and Peder Christian Jeppesen, who passed through this staff, later became makers known under their own names.

Ottendahl's definition of "handmade" did not exclude having the rough shaping done on automatic lathes; where the hand came in was the final shaping and finishing stages, and the master would say so openly. What truly set the result apart was staying away from copy-milling: there are many KE pipes that resemble one another, but none is an exact copy of another. The majority of the mouthpieces came from Stanwell nearly finished, and the sandblasting work, too, was mostly done at the same firm.

The workshop's products were not sold only under its own stamp. For the Danish and US markets, production was also carried out under names such as Champ of Denmark, Knute, Larsen & Stigart, Shelburne, Garrick, Sven Egholm, and Wenhall. Because these names occasionally overlapped, and were even used together on the same pipe, making a clear distinction based on the stamp alone is not possible for most examples.

Quality Stamps

In the old system, quality was indicated by numbers rising from 4 to 1, with the "Extravagant" stamp applied to pieces made entirely by hand. In the later system, the numbers were replaced by letters running from D to A, while Extravagant examples were divided into the tiers C, B, A, AA, and AAA. Outside this system, the stamp "II S" has long been debated among collectors. None of the explanations circulating in the community have been confirmed; the only point that can be confirmed is that these pipes went only to the US market.

Return to Working Alone

Because the freehand fell out of favor worldwide and buyers pressed for lower prices, Ottendahl cut off exports to the US entirely in 1987. Running the factory left him no time to sit at his own bench; in 1990 he stepped back from management and returned to working alone once more. In this final period he moved toward more classic shapes, took the grain of the briar he used as the determinant of form, and hand-cut his mouthpieces. In the 1990s he designed several models for Stanwell's H.C. Andersen series. Around 1998-99 he transferred the German rights to the "Karl Erik" name to Planta Tabak-Manufaktur; from then on he signed his own work sent to the German market with his surname, under the "Ottendahl" stamp. After a thirteen-year gap, US sales reopened in 2000. Ottendahl died on 12 September 2004 at his home in Korsør, on the island of Zealand, following a stroke.