Zaidi’s is America’s only full-service lighter shop and Lower Manhattan destination for rare, strange, and beautifully designed objects. With an ever-changing collection spanning more than a century, we treat the everyday lighter as something worth collecting, restoring, and keeping.

The pieces that come through our doors were made all over the world—from Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and France to the United States, Occupied Japan, and places we still can’t quite identify. Ronsons, Dunhills, Art Deco table lighters, obscure semi-automatics, and objects whose makers have long since disappeared.

Some arrive beautiful. Most arrive dead. They leave working.

Restoration means learning how each maker solved the same fundamental problems in a different way. Springs, valves, flints, fuel, seals, ignition systems—the components may be familiar, but their relationship changes from lighter to lighter. Understanding those differences is what allows us to bring old objects back to life.

We spent years taking lighters apart before making one of our own. What we make comes from everything those objects taught us.