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Home > What's New > The "B" Word
The "B" Word
Posted: Monday, November 29, 2004
By David Savona I was standing at the podium in Las Vegas, leading a seminar at The Big Smoke, when I heard the word from José Seijas, the general manager of Tabacalera de Garcia, the world's largest handmade cigar factory. "I think there's a mini-boom going on," he said.
Boom. Big word in the cigar business. The cigar boom was the period from late 1992 to 1997, when cigar demand was much, much greater than cigar supply, and virtually anything brown and cylindrical would sell for big bucks. America was cigar crazy. Then things cooled down.
Flash forward to November 2004. I'm standing in front of 400 passionate cigar smokers, people serious enough about their cigar smoking to be sitting at a table at the (relatively) ungodly hour of 9 a.m. to attend our magazine's version of Cigar School, the seminars that bring cigar smokers closer to cigarmakers and cover various aspects of the industry. That weekend, 6,000 people would attend our Big Smoke, turning the Mandalay Bay into the world's biggest cigar party.
I puffed on my cigar as Seijas spoke, then turned to face panelist David Kitchens, who manages Davidoff's Madison Avenue store in New York City. "How's business, David?"
He had that look one takes on when things are going great but you can't quite explain why. "Business is great," he said. His numbers are up in the double digits. Cigar imports are up in the double digits. More premium cigars will be sold this year than in any year since the late 1990s.
But is it a mini-boom, as Seijas said? Eric M. Newman, president of the J.C. Newman Cigar Co., used the same word in a recent Q&A in Cigar Insider. If it is a boom, it's nothing like the cigar boom of the 1990s.
The cigar boom was a mixed blessing for cigar smokers. On the positive side, cigars were thrust into the mainstream and became more popular. Before the boom, lighting up a cigar typically meant you would be scolded by someone standing downwind of your double corona. During the boom smoking a cigar made you look cool. On the negative side, the cigars that longtime smokers loved were impossible to find, and many of the cigars that you could easily find were expensive and lousy.
Today, it's quite different. People aren't smoking cigars to be trendy, cool or stylish. They're smoking cigars because they like them. Because they enjoy the experience. Because for about $5 they can spend an hour sampling one of life's greatest luxuries.
Is it a boom? I don't think so. Are sales strong? Absolutely. While some manufacturers are back-ordered on their hottest products, supply and demand aren't that far apart. And quite unlike the boom days, the product on the market is absolutely top-notch, ensuring that people who try a cigar for the first time have a good chance of enjoying the product.
Put all those factors together and I think strong sales will last for a while. And that's very unboom-like. Also in Cigar News:
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