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The inspiration behind the Suka Pipe

by Jeffrey Han on May 16, 2023

The design behind the Suka pipe came together beautifully and with an elegant symmetry.  The center-placed bowl was perfect to put in a rotating trackball. Think computer mouse from the 90’s. I was considering making the bowl smokable both right-side up and upside down, but couldn’t because of the placement of the interior loading tray.

It turns out that the symmetry is radial but not vertical. The silicone of the trackball allowed for an elegant solution to remove the cap and bowl: just simply push in the ball from the bottom. Both the cap and the bowl will pop out. 
Figuring out the smoke path was a challenge.  Eventually a simple solution was found: matching holes in both the trackball and the trackball cradle allowed the smoke to travel below the loading tray. Then, drilling a mouthpiece hole on the bottom shell connected the air path.

The open space below the loading tray allowed us to design donut 🍩 shaped filters elegantly and simply.  Future inserts may include maze-like smoke path elongation to cool smoke.  Another possibility is a fidget spinner-like device placed inside to spin the smoke around and around. These will be future releases.

Another feature we enjoy 😊 is the common item replacement of the cap if lost. Just take a US nickel to replace the lost cap; this means no down time and no additional expenditure. It’s truly a design feature that benefits the Suka Pipe user. 

With our 5th pipe design since 2007, we added one more value to 7Pipe’s pillars of design, which are in this order: Safety, Durability, Functional, Beautiful. We added ‘Playful’ because we made aliens to sit in the cockpit of the UFO, by turning the glass bowl upside down. I really couldn’t predict that the Suka Smoking Pipe would turn out to look EXACTLY like a UFO 🛸.

The mouth piece on the Suka is probably the most comfortable fit on the lips of any pipe as well. One design challenge is the distance of the bowl to the face. The distance is close but after a while one gets used to it.  However, if one has a big snozzer or long fake eyelashes, caution is prudent.

The marketing challenge is that the automatic loading function of the Süka pipe cannot be easily discerned like the Twisty.  It’s difficult to get that AHA moment from the consumer.  Therefore videos and demonstrations rule the roost. 
In conclusion, we are very pleased with the Suka design as everything fell into place nicely and we discovered new aspects to the pipe as we went along the design process.  The new auto-load function is elegant and extremely useful for the Suka smoker. Safe, durable, and beautiful, the Suka Pipe checks all the boxes.