Every glass pipe I've ever owned went the same way. They'd work fine for a while and then they wouldn't, because there's no way to get inside one and actually clean it. At some point you're just holding a dirty object.
Eventually I got tired enough of that cycle to go looking for something better, and there was nothing out there that spoke to me. Nothing ticked all the boxes. The metal pipes I tried were made of cheap metal and tasted gross. I found a wooden one I liked because it had a sliding cover over the bowl, but wood felt weird to smoke out of because, you know. And no glass pipe gives you access to the inside.
So I started Artifact to design the objects I wanted for myself. The first one was always going to be a pipe. Four years later that became the Tempest.
What I got out of those four years, more than the pipe itself, was a standard. Every object should be able to justify its own existence. A lot of what we own probably can't, and the price on it tells you surprisingly little about which kind you're holding.
What you actually pay for a cheap object
I have real respect for glass pipes. They're legacy, some of them are genuinely beautiful, and there's a reason the basic design has lasted as long as it has. I just don't want one as my daily driver, which is a different question than whether they're good.
Glass can be inexpensive, which makes it accessible, and that's a big part of why most people end up with one. It's also breakable and impossible to clean properly, so eventually it stops being the object you bought. You replace it, and then you replace that one. Buy the cheap version of anything enough times and you've spent more than the good one would have cost, except you have nothing to show for it.
That's what a sticker price hides. The real cost of an object is what it costs to keep having one.
Expensive doesn't prove anything either
There are pipes out there selling for eight thousand dollars. We wrote about those separately. At that end of the market you're often paying for art, scarcity, provenance, or the name of the artist, which is perfectly legitimate. It just doesn't necessarily mean you're buying a pipe that works eight thousand dollars better.
The cheap end fails differently, and a lot more often. You usually don't find out until you've lived with the thing for a while. A grinder that sticks. A lighter with bad pressure. An ashtray that spills every time you move it. A pipe you can't maintain. Somebody had a price to hit, and the way they hit it was by leaving out something you were going to need.
The Volcano by Storz & Bickel is what the expensive end looks like when the premium is functional. You can feel where the money went the first time you use it. Better parts, better build, and it does the job the same way years later as it did on day one. You pay once and then you stop thinking about it, which is the whole return.
So it isn't about cheap or expensive. It's whether the object can do its job at the price it's asking for.
It's all or nothing
Most objects are good at one thing and assume you'll forget or forgive the rest.
When I was sitting in my home office looking at a crusty glass pipe I couldn't clean, I didn't just want a better pipe. I wanted one that worked really well, that I could actually clean, and that looked good enough to leave out on a shelf. All three in the same object, with none of them negotiable against the others. Nothing I'd seen ticked all three boxes, so I got to work.
That's still the first check I run on anything I design. Does it work as good as it looks? Would I genuinely be happier owning it? If the answer is no to either one, no amount of engineering or styling fixes that.
From there it's drawings, CAD, prototypes, and back to drawings, as many times around as it takes. The full version of that story, four years of it, is a post of its own. I'll get to it.
How I got here
Before this I spent my career directing commercials and music videos. Before that I was a kid building props for movies I shot myself, which is probably the more relevant credential.
I studied film at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, but the school also had a huge product design program. I'd go to the shows the design students put on and walk around looking at what they'd built, quietly wishing I was doing that. They got to make objects you could actually pick up and hold. That feeling I got from good design never really left me.
Film won and I'm not sorry about it. It consumed me and I gave it everything I had.
Then COVID hit and I suddenly had time that wasn't in service of a career. I started teaching myself product design and didn't question it for a second. I'd been modeling in CG for years, so making pictures of objects was familiar. Making objects was not. CAD I had to learn from scratch, and I had a friend in Los Angeles who owned a machine shop who walked me through what a drawing actually has to account for if somebody is going to cut it out of metal. That guidance was indispensable.
Once I started, I didn't stop. I was mocking up objects constantly. Pipes, ashtrays, stash jars, dozens of them. The early designs were so far out that I started calling them artifacts from the future, mostly as a joke.
But the name stuck and I got serious about what I was designing. Artifacts. Things you discover that have real value. Treasures that weren't buried.
Ideas have to survive reality
Prototyping is the final test. An idea can look great in a drawing or in CAD, but once you're holding it in your hand, sometimes it's obvious it just doesn't work. The proportions are wrong. It feels awkward. Or maybe there's simply nothing there worth pursuing.
That's the hard part, because by then you've usually spent enough time with the idea to want it to work. But if the physical object doesn't live up to the idea, you have to let it go and start again.
Plenty of things I've designed couldn't justify their existence, so those don't get made.
Try it on something you already own
None of this requires buying anything from me. Pick up whatever is closest to you right now and ask whether it's actually doing its job, or whether you've just gotten used to the ways it doesn't. Most of us probably own more of the second kind than we'd like to admit. I did for years, and it took an old glass pipe I couldn't clean to make me notice.
Every object is a series of compromises. Cost, materials, manufacturing, shipping, durability, appearance, all of it. Compromise isn't the problem. The question is who the compromise was made for. If the thing in your hand is worse to use because somebody needed it to be cheaper to make, easier to ship, or easier to replace, you're the one living with that decision.
That's the standard for me now. It should work as good as it looks. I should be happier owning it. And if it can't justify its existence, I probably don't need it.
