We propose a heuristic for the construction of variablestride multibit tries. These multibit tries are suitable for packet forwarding using a pipelined architecture. The variable-stride tries constructed by our heuristic require upto 1/32 of the per-stage memory required by optimal pipelined fixed-stride tries. We also develop a tree packing heuristic, which dramatically reduces the per-stage memory required by fixed- and variable-stride multibit tries constructed for pipelined architectures. On publicly available router databases, our tree packing heuristic reduces the maximum per-stage memory required by optimal pipelined fixed-stride tries