“We visited the Danish pipe heaven” – this was the title of my article as a freelance journalist in Tobacco 2019/05. It was about The Danish Pipe Shop in Copenhagen, which was run from 1969 until his death in 2011 by Steffen Nielsen, father of the current managing director and part-owner Nikolaj Liberoth Nielsen. “As a child, I used to play with pipe boxes in the basement warehouse. My father’s colleagues must have been very happy about that,” Nikolaj Nielsen told me five years ago in his small office in the Copenhagen shop.

His father had turned what had been a deli into a pipe shop, where he tried to sell affordable pipes to the working classes; in the meantime he also supported local pipe-makers. Following the death of Steffen Nielsen in 2011, Nikolaj took over the business and opened The Danish Pipe Shop’s webshop in the same year. In 2014, world-famous Danish pipe maker Tom Eltang bought a 20% stake in the company, and in 2016, the shop moved from the famous Strøget shopping street to a nearby but less touristy street, Vester Voldgade.

Speaking of webshops: as was the case five years ago, they still sell around 20-30 pipes a day, seven days a week.

“[…] but with an higher average price. A lot of our increase the last years have been cigar sales that has increased with 4-500% since COVID-19,”

Nikolaj Liberoth Nielsen told us in January 2024, when contacted by e-mail. While five years ago, the share of online sales in total sales was 55 percent, it has now risen to 65 percent. So the purchases made in the Vester Voldgade store account for 35 percent of total sales.

“In general, we have had some good years and continued our progress in terms of sales and profit. We have more staff, and a mile stone was that we now have a Chinese emplyee to service our increasing number of private online Chinese customers and launched a Chinese version of our webshop,”

says Nikolaj Nielsen about recent developments of The Danish Pipe Shop.

Of course we also asked the manager if they were going to do something similar for the pipe shop’s 55th birthday, as they did for the fiftieth, when they sold anniversary Nørding and Eltang pipes and anniversary tobacco. “Honestly, we have been to busy to plan anything, so I am not sure. Maybe a limited edition pipe from Tom Eltang,” Nikolaj Liberoth Nielsen told us in January 2024.

In our article five years ago, the CEO also said, that lawmakers can always make decisions that make their job much harder. As an example, he mentioned that they used to buy tobacco from all over the world in their online shop, but due to the tightening of customs rules on tobacco, they had to stop exporting tobacco by 2019. Nielsen said five years ago, they had no long-term plans, so it was up to them to decide when they would introduce new, stricter legislation on tobacco trade.

Asked if he was still pessimistic about the future five years later, Nikolaj Liberoth Nielsen replied,

“I don’t feel I was pessimistic but more realistic. But no, my mindset has not changed. It’s still a line dance where we navigate around authorities locally and abroad. For instance we are not allowed to show pictures of tobacco products to Danish customers. We had made the site so the Danes could not see them, but outside Denmark they could see the products, but not buy tobacco. Nevertheless Italian authorities closed our website after they had a new law where they banned pictures of tobacco. So right now, we are working with an attorney so the Italians again can buy pipes and non tobacco products.”

Although the future is shrouded in fog, The Danish Pipe Shop has persevered for 55 years to supply the lovers of a passion that is dying out in the rush of the 21st century.