Bill Shalosky made his first pipe in college, but not from briar; though he studied wood-turning as well, the main focus of his studies at the Columbus College of Art and Design was ceramics, and so his first attempts at creating his own smoking instruments were worked in clay. They weren't great, he admits, but he was hooked. After graduation and running the ceramics lab for a year, his pipemaking career proper began at Smokers' Haven, where his duties covered estate-pipe restoration as well as producing pipes for the Chheda line. Parallel with that, Bill began making pipes under his name.

Now, in addition to crafting his own line of artisanal pipes, Bill is also (very happily) a part of Todd Johnson and Pete Prevost's team at BriarWorks, where he says learning the batch-production processes has taught him much useful to improving the efficiency of work-flow applicable to individual steps shared in common with making pipes by hand.