PART IV
TWENTY QUESTIONS FOR THE MANUFACTURERS
ACT I — WHAT ARE WE EVEN TALKING ABOUT?
CHAPTER 25
QUESTION 1 — WHAT IS BOUTIQUE SUPPOSED TO MEASURE?
The premium cigar industry uses the word boutique with remarkable confidence for a term it has never been especially good at defining. It appears in retailer conversations, reviews, advertisements, trade-show discussions, podcasts, press releases, and ordinary conversations between smokers. A company is boutique; a factory is boutique; a cigar is boutique; a blend is boutique. Sometimes a company with a handful of employees gets the label, and sometimes a brand producing millions of cigars does. Sometimes the cigar is made in a tiny factory, and sometimes it comes from a factory producing enormous volumes for companies of every size.
The word survives all of it. Before deciding whether that is a problem, there is a simpler question: what is boutique supposed to measure? If it is merely a compliment, there is not much to investigate; it becomes another pleasant adjective attached to premium cigars, somewhere between artisanal and passionate. Those words may communicate a feeling, but they do not classify much of anything.
If boutique is supposed to distinguish one kind of cigar company from another, then it has to identify something. The manufacturers themselves do not offer a single answer, but what they do offer is a pattern. James Brown strips away one of the easiest assumptions immediately. James Brown understands the importance of branding; his companies have some of the most recognizable visual identities in the market, and he openly acknowledges the relationship between that identity and the people who connect with it. Yet when he turns specifically to boutique, he moves away from the artwork and toward the work underneath it. For James Brown, boutique is about "dedication to craft."
James Brown sharpens the split when he considers the opposite case. A small company can create attractive packaging, make a limited number of cigars at a large factory, use tobacco already employed in mass production, and present the finished product with all the visual signals consumers associate with boutique. James Brown does not accept that presentation as proof. Small batches and good graphics cannot manufacture craftsmanship after the fact. His standard begins with raw materials, how those materials are treated, how willing the maker is to experiment, and whether the product exists because somebody had an idea worth pursuing rather than because a portfolio needed another SKU.
Andre Farkas approaches the question from a similarly product-centered direction, but he expands it into an operating philosophy. He describes Viaje as a small-scale producer committed to quality over quantity, yet size is not where his definition ends. His projects begin with tobacco, curiosity, a farm, a leaf, or sometimes a single bale. If the tobacco cannot support the cigar he has in mind, the project waits or disappears. That is a very different business logic from beginning with a production target and forcing the tobacco to satisfy it.
Andre Farkas eventually reduces his view to a sentence: "Boutique is not a size. It is a mindset."
That sentence sounds broad enough to create another problem until the rest of his answer supplies the conditions. His mindset is not an inspirational poster hanging over the rolling floor. It requires process over scale, relationships over supply chains, expression over mass appeal, and a willingness to allow the product itself to interrupt the commercial plan.
Sébastien Decoppet, Founder of Cavalier Genève Cigars, goes even further. He thinks the word has become corrupted because it lacks a clear definition. His preferred alternative is almost brutally simple: "Boutique should have meant craft."
Craft, in Sébastien Decoppet’s formulation, directs attention to the approach, the reason behind the work, how the work is performed, and what finally comes out of it. That removes much of the argument over corporate size and replaces it with something closer to operating behavior.
Sébastien Decoppet’s own wording makes the standard more precise: "Craft focuses on the approach, the why, the how, and the result of all of this." That is a harder standard than smallness because it asks what actually happened between intention and finished cigar. A company cannot satisfy it by shrinking the production number or improving the artwork.
Terence Reilly, Vice President of Aganorsa Leaf, reaches nearly the same destination from a factory perspective. He places boutique in the process rather than the name on the box. Using process as the test creates an immediate complication for anyone trying to classify companies by their logos. A small brand can work with a much larger manufacturer and still produce something specialized, experimental, or genuinely limited if the tobacco and process justify the description. Conversely, putting a small company’s band around overruns or ordinary production does not magically transform the cigar. Under that definition, boutique can belong to the cigar without necessarily belonging to the factory.
Giselle Herrera, President of El Titan de Bronze Cigars, makes the idea more physical. "To me, boutique isn’t defined by size alone. It’s defined by intention."
At El Titan de Bronze, intention does not remain abstract. The factory operates close enough to the work that Giselle Herrera can point to bundles and boxes and know who rolled them. That level of proximity turns boutique into something observable. The people directing the operation remain close to the people making the cigars, and the product retains a direct line back to identifiable hands.
Giselle Herrera makes the accountability physical: "At El Titan de Bronze, boutique means being hands-on. Every bundle and every box—we know exactly who rolled it." That kind of knowledge is not atmosphere; it is operational proximity. Whether the industry wants to call it boutique or not, it identifies a real difference in how close the people directing the company remain to the work.
Erik Espinosa, President of Espinosa Premium Cigars, describes that proximity through authority rather than factory size. When asked whether boutique ever really existed as a meaningful category, his first reaction was to challenge the measurement itself: Is it sales? If so, how small must the number be?
His own answer goes elsewhere. "I consider us boutique in the sense that we’re hands on. We’re not corporate."
The practical advantage, in Erik Espinosa's view, is speed and direct authority. A decision does not have to travel through layers of approval before somebody can act. The person responsible for the product is close enough to the decision to make it. Jon Huber pushes the category toward identity. For Jon Huber, boutique is more about the ethos of a brand than its production volume, company size, or annual revenue. He associates the category with recognizable human beings standing behind brands rather than anonymous structures in which responsibility becomes difficult to locate.
That does not contradict James Brown, Andre Farkas, Terence Reilly, Giselle Herrera, or Erik Espinosa as much as it initially appears. All of them are describing some form of proximity. James Brown describes proximity to the materials; Andre Farkas describes proximity to the tobacco and creative decision; Terence Reilly describes proximity to process; Giselle Herrera describes physical proximity to production; Erik Espinosa describes proximity to authority; Jon Huber describes proximity to authorship.
The common idea is proximity: to materials, tobacco, process, authority, or authorship. Boutique, in its strongest form, appears to tell the consumer that the cigar remains close to the people responsible for it. A smaller organization can make that easier because it naturally has fewer layers, but scale is not the same thing as proximity.
A tiny company can be far removed from the cigar it sells, while a large operation can exercise extraordinary control over tobacco, fermentation, blending, aging, and quality. The manufacturer responses therefore do not suggest that boutique means nothing. They suggest that the word is trying to describe something real while carrying too many versions of it at once: craft, process, intention, control, independence, authorship, personality, and production volume.
CHAPTER 26
QUESTION 2 — HAS BOUTIQUE EVER MEANT THE SAME THING?
It would be convenient if the history were simple. Boutique once meant one thing, everybody understood it, and then the market grew, marketers got hold of the word, and the definition collapsed. There is only one problem with that story: the people who were there do not remember the same definition. Lew Rothman, Founder and Former CEO of JR Cigars, remembers boutique partly through retail economics. In his account, boutique brands were attractive to local tobacconists because they were largely absent from discount and mail-order channels. The retailer could promote something different without watching the same customer find the same cigar at a volume outlet for less money.
That is not the modern romantic image of boutique; it is practical. The distinction concerned distribution, channel protection, retailer opportunity, and scarcity within a particular selling environment. Lew Rothman is not claiming those cigars were inferior; he is saying the original commercial usefulness of the word was not necessarily that boutique meant artistically superior. It helped identify products that lived differently in the marketplace.
Lew Rothman’s own language makes the original retail logic unmistakable. A tobacconist, he recalls, “could then promote the boutique item without the fear of their customer being stolen by volume outlets selling the same goods for less.” That is a very different origin from the later idea that boutique certified artistry. The early value could be commercial protection for the local retailer.
Then the marketplace changed. Lew Rothman remembers the proliferation of boutique cigars eventually giving way to another favored distinction: limited editions. The irony is difficult to miss. Once enough products become special, the market needs a new word to identify what is supposedly more special than the other special products.
Lew Rothman is also wonderfully unsentimental about what happened next: “As the number of so called ‘boutique’ cigars proliferated importers and manufacturers moved on to ‘limited editions’ which as anyone with half a brain realizes are now available in an unlimited and never-ending number.” The joke works because the pattern is familiar. Once a label of distinction becomes commercially useful, the market reproduces the distinction until it needs another label.
Dr. Paul B.K. Garmirian, Founder of PG Cigars, remembers another version of the same period. PG Cigars emerged in 1990 after decades in which he had developed a deep relationship with premium cigars and then published The Gourmet Guide to Cigars. When a cigar bearing his name entered the market, it was labeled boutique. He did not enter the business planning to produce millions of cigars; the operation was small, the production limited, and the relationships personal. Yet even Dr. Paul B.K. Garmirian describes the boutique concept as “ambiguous and vague.”
His recollection is that many smaller startup companies entering the market used the label, some hoping to grow large enough eventually to leave it behind. PG Cigars made a different decision. By 1996, the company was selling roughly 720,000 cigars, demand exceeded supply, and Dr. Paul B.K. Garmirian and his son Kevork consciously decided not to chase every available account. They stayed, in the company’s own phrase, “Small by Choice.”
Dr. Paul B.K. Garmirian’s conclusion is direct: “The term ‘boutique’ changed drastically after the boom.”
Sébastien Decoppet arrives at the modern end of that history from another direction: “Boutique is not defined by a clear definition and has therefore now slowly been corrupted as a term.” Corrupted may sound harsh, but it captures what happens when a useful word gains applications faster than it gains boundaries.
That observation is especially useful because it comes from somebody whose company was actually placed inside the category before the boom transformed the market. Ernesto Pérez-Carrillo approaches the historical difference through environment rather than definition. The first wave of smaller independent companies had fewer tools. Word of mouth carried enormous weight, and cigar media was narrower. Brands developed slowly, cigar by cigar, line by line, retailer by retailer. A modern brand enters a different world. Social media, cigar media, festivals, clubs, events, factory trips, podcasts, and instant communication can place a new name in front of thousands of consumers almost immediately. Ernesto Pérez-Carrillo does not argue that one period was better.
He makes a more useful distinction: “Both groups can still share the word, but they do not share the same origin story.”
That is the historical problem in one sentence: the same term survived while the conditions beneath it changed. Christian Eiroa, Founder of CLE Cigar Company and Eiroa, raises an even more inconvenient possibility: maybe boutique was never as central to traditional cigar makers as later industry memory suggests. Christian Eiroa remembers boutique as language from the late 1990s that he never particularly warmed to. He was trained by older cigar men whose vocabulary was more direct. They made cigars, built brands, and worried about tobacco, process, employees, production, relationships, and whether the cigar earned its place. “We make cigars and never thought of them as anything other than a brand or a cigar.”
That does not mean boutique was imaginary; it means the industry should be careful about projecting a modern category backward and assuming everyone living through an earlier era organized the business around it.
Steve Saka attacks the same assumption from the opposite direction. He says he has always found boutique “very nebulous” as a cigar-industry term. In his view, people assign their own interpretations to it, and none of the common measurements settles the issue. Company age does not do it; valuation does not do it; production quantity does not do it. Small brands can be made in huge factories, and huge companies can make genuinely tiny batches.
Steve Saka does not merely argue that the definition changed; he questions whether the definition was ever stable enough to deserve the confidence placed in it.
Jon Huber expresses almost the same fatigue with less interest in rescuing the terminology: “Boutique is one of those terms that gets tossed around so much in this industry, like ‘passion,’ that the term holds little true meaning other than what it means to the individual.” That is not an argument that the underlying qualities are imaginary; it is an argument that the vocabulary has stopped policing itself.
Even if the industry never possessed one universally accepted definition, contributors can still identify moments when the modern use of boutique changed direction. Jon Huber points to Tatuaje: “For me, though, the biggest game-changer in the boutique sector was and always will be Pete Johnson.”
Jon Huber dates that shift to Tatuaje's arrival in 2003, when consumers became increasingly receptive to smaller brands driven by an individual vision rather than established legacy-name loyalty. He places Dion Giolito, Andre Farkas, Matt Booth, and Crowned Heads among the companies that followed through the opening Pete Johnson helped create.
That does not establish 2003 as the birth of boutique. The evidence has already shown that the values and even the terminology predate it. What it does identify is a recognizable transition in the modern boutique market, when founder-driven micro brands became a more visible consumer category.
Dion Giolito describes what happened next. Companies of radically different sizes learned to fit boutique into whatever narrative suited their operations. A tiny business could use it, a multinational company could use it, or a company could attach the word to a particular project even when the organization behind that project looked nothing like the structure consumers traditionally associated with boutique. “In essence, the word ‘boutique’ has been diluted.”
There is a particular historical irony in Dion Giolito making that observation. Illusione itself was once held up in cigar media as nearly an archetype of boutique production. The company’s deliberate development process, limited experimental production, patience with blends, and resistance to constantly expanding the portfolio fit the image almost perfectly. The man associated with one of the category’s clearest examples now looks at the word and sees dilution. Mel Shah, Founder of MBombay Tobacco, gives the before-and-after account without needing a historical lecture. He stepped away from the industry and later returned: “When I stepped away, boutique mostly meant small production.”
What did he find on returning? “Now, in many cases, it’s become positioning. Something you say, not something you prove.”
The shift is not from one universally accepted definition to no definition; the word accumulated jobs. Boutique could describe limited production, a startup, protected retail, independence, founder direction, experimental production, a feeling of discovery, or eventually the way a company wanted consumers to perceive it. Those meanings overlapped for a time, then the market expanded and the overlaps weakened.
The word remained because it continued doing useful work even after the conditions underneath it stopped moving together.
CHAPTER 27
QUESTION 3 — WHO GETS TO DECIDE WHAT IS BOUTIQUE?
Industries usually make classification easier by establishing some authority over the classification. Wine has appellations, governments define regulated product categories, trade organizations create standards, manufacturers publish specifications, and even sports leagues eventually produce rulebooks thick enough to injure somebody. Boutique has none of that. There is no governing body deciding when a cigar company enters the category, no annual production figure agreed upon by manufacturers, no ownership test, no distribution limit, and no certification stamped on a box declaring that the product contains the legally required percentage of boutique. The word belongs to whoever happens to be using it.
Skip Martin says exactly that: “I honestly do not know what ‘boutique’ means in the context of cigars. I think different people mean different things when using the word.”
Skip Martin personally uses a much narrower definition than most of the contemporary cigar market. For him, a real boutique brand is something closer to a small private-label project made for a single retailer.
He is not vague about his own preferred boundary: “For me, a real boutique brand is a small private-label brand made for a single retailer.” Most of the industry would consider that definition unusually narrow today, but its narrowness is what makes it useful. Skip Martin demonstrates how dramatically the category can change depending on who is holding the ruler.
He then points out why ordinary market usage becomes difficult to defend. Many brands commonly described as boutique are produced in factories making hundreds of thousands of cigars every day. Meanwhile, plenty of very small brands and very small factories fail to produce cigars that live up to the positive qualities consumers assume when they hear the word. Size cannot resolve it, factory size cannot resolve it, and quality cannot be assumed from it.
Skip Martin finally reaches the unavoidable conclusion: “What separates one group from another is really whatever the person using the word means when they use it.”
That is an extraordinary amount of authority to give a word with no governing definition. Justin Andrews, New Business Development Manager at Scandinavian Tobacco Group, speaking from the unusual position of Diesel inside the company, helps explain how the problem survives: “A brand has two identities, one is internal and one is external.”
Justin Andrews also gives Diesel a revealing historical placement inside that structure: “Diesel was the only ‘boutique’ brand in STG’s portfolio.” The statement sounds contradictory only if corporate ownership is assumed to settle identity automatically. Inside the same organization, one brand could be positioned, operated, and experienced differently from the others.
Internally, a company knows its ownership, resources, production relationships, budgets, distribution systems, decision-making structure, and corporate support. Externally, the consumer sees something else: a band, a name, a personality, a story, a cigar, perhaps a factory association, and whatever reputation has accumulated around those things. Those identities can diverge.
Diesel benefits from what Justin Andrews openly calls “the machine that is STG.” That is real, and so is the independent personality consumers associate with Diesel. The institutional platform and the market-facing identity exist simultaneously.
Which one gets to decide whether the brand is boutique? If the corporate structure decides, the answer may be obvious; if consumers decide by what the brand feels like, the answer can be entirely different. Matt Booth pushes the external identity even further. He acknowledges that endless definitions can be attached to boutique, but his own version is emotional and human. A boutique brand, in Matt Booth’s simplest formulation, “feels human.”
It is tangible; it has a soul. That description cannot be audited from an annual report because it lives in perception. Consumers recognize personality, authorship, attitude, humor, inconsistency, risk, and the sense that an actual human being is making choices behind the product. The market can therefore grant boutique identity to a brand even when the underlying corporate structure complicates the label. Authority cannot be settled by simply declaring that manufacturers should define themselves.
Companies have an obvious interest in their own classification. Boutique carries positive associations in the premium cigar market: craft, discovery, limited availability, authenticity, personality, independence, and attention to detail. A company allowed to award itself that language without evidence is not participating in classification; it is participating in marketing. Retailers supply another kind of authority: they see how products move, know which companies are accessible, which owners show up, which brands disappear after an initial burst, which lines require explanation, which ones generate repeat purchases, and which supposedly boutique products arrive with all the intimacy of a shipping container.
Retail judgment is practical because shelf space has consequences. Consumers exert a different kind of authority over ordinary market language because language eventually belongs to the people using it. A manufacturer may be describing structure, a retailer market position, and a consumer experience. Each can be internally consistent.
All three can use boutique accurately according to their own meaning while describing three different things. That is the category’s authority problem. Nobody is lying merely because the definitions differ. The manufacturer who sees boutique as production scale may be perfectly consistent; the consumer who sees boutique as personality may also be consistent; the retailer who uses boutique to distinguish discovery-driven brands from permanent humidor staples can be consistent as well. The inconsistency appears when the industry treats those individual judgments as though they belong to one shared classification. They do not. The market has effectively created a word whose definition is negotiated every time it is used. That flexibility is probably one reason boutique survived, and it is also why the term can no longer settle many of the arguments in which it appears.
CHAPTER 28
QUESTION 4 — CAN SIZE DEFINE BOUTIQUE?
Size is irresistible because size can be counted: annual production, retail accounts, employees, countries of distribution, and factory capacity can all be measured. Finally, after all the talk about soul, ethos, intention, authenticity, and mindset, here comes a number. Then somebody asks how small is small.
Casey Haugen, Vice President of CRUX Cigars, asks the question in the form the industry usually avoids: “what is a small batch in the cigar world...” A number can be useful only after somebody agrees where the number stops meaning one thing and starts meaning another. The cigar business has never reached that agreement.
The relief does not last long. Glen Case, Founder of Kristoff Cigars, offers one of the clearest numerical views in the manufacturer record: “In my view, a boutique brand is one that may be producing a few hundred-thousand cigars a year.”
Glen Case is willing to apply his own threshold to his own company: “Kristoff surpassed that more than fourteen years ago.” That candor matters. A size definition has little value if every successful company somehow remains exempt from the point at which the definition would exclude it.
Under that definition, Kristoff left boutique behind a long time ago. Glen Case does not present that as an apology; Kristoff expanded throughout the United States and into roughly sixty countries outside it. The business grew, and the operating reality changed. He had already stated publicly that he no longer believed Kristoff should be considered boutique, and when asked directly where the point of departure occurred, his answer was consistent: the company surpassed his boutique threshold more than fourteen years earlier.
There is something appealing about Glen Case’s position because it actually draws a line. The industry desperately wants boutique to distinguish smaller companies from larger ones, and Glen Case is willing to say that at some point a company can simply become too large for the word to remain useful at the company level. Jonas Santana, President of Blackbird Cigars, rejects the simplicity of that conclusion without dismissing scale entirely: “Size alone does not accurately define what it means to be boutique.”
Jonas Santana focuses instead on whether a company has enough discipline to control production in order to preserve standards. Under that approach, annual volume is relevant because volume creates pressure. The important measurement is whether the company allows the pressure to dictate the cigar. Glen Case treats scale as part of the boundary, whereas Jonas Santana treats restraint as the evidence. Daniel Lance, Founder of Domain Cigars, moves between the two positions by describing what size eventually forces a company to become: “The line is operational reality.”
Daniel Lance argues that once a brand reaches roughly one million cigars annually, its relationship with production has to become more formal. That number is not a universal law; nobody rolls cigar number 1,000,001 and receives a certificate announcing the death of boutique. What changes is responsibility. At meaningful volume, a company is no longer dealing only with blends and boxes; it is dealing with tobacco commitments, inventory, manufacturing capacity, agricultural cycles, working capital, quality control, distribution obligations, retailer expectations, and the consequences of failing to coordinate them.
Daniel Lance offers something more useful than a boutique cutoff: he identifies a point at which scale begins forcing structural change. “Around the one million cigar per year mark, a brand is effectively forced to formalize its relationship with production.”
That is a different claim. Daniel Lance is not declaring that the 999,999th cigar is boutique and the millionth one is not. He is identifying an operational pressure point. At sufficient volume, informal arrangements become harder to maintain, and production relationships, inventory, scheduling, forecasting, and accountability begin requiring more structure. Scale therefore matters even if it cannot define boutique by itself.
Growth changes the operating system, which gives size real significance without allowing size to settle the entire classification. Two companies producing the same number of cigars may not operate remotely the same way. One may own a factory and control tobacco inventories, while another may contract production. One may distribute directly, while another may rely on a national partner. One may employ a substantial sales force, while another may depend on its founders to visit accounts personally. One may make a permanent national portfolio, while another may move through a series of limited projects dictated by tobacco availability.
A production number cannot describe all of that. The strongest argument for size is therefore not that small automatically equals boutique, but that scale creates structural consequences. More cigars require more tobacco; more tobacco requires greater planning; greater distribution creates more obligations; more employees create layers; and more markets create logistical demands. Success can put distance between the founder and individual cigars simply because one person can no longer touch everything.
However, scale can also do the opposite of what boutique mythology assumes. Greater resources can allow a company to hold deeper tobacco inventories, age leaf longer, reject material without threatening the entire production schedule, invest in quality control, employ experienced people, and protect consistency from crop variation.
Smallness can create freedom and vulnerability. Limited capital may narrow options when tobacco disappears, capacity changes, shipments slip, or demand outruns supply; deeper resources can sometimes let a larger company refuse compromises a smaller one cannot afford. Size matters, but it does not behave morally. Growth is not proof that a company stopped caring, and smallness is not proof that it ever cared.
Size measures footprint and some forms of organizational pressure, but it does not automatically measure craftsmanship, intention, independence, quality, or proximity to the cigar. Glen Case is right to give scale classificatory weight, and Jonas Santana is right that the number alone cannot tell us what happens inside the operation.
Steve Saka attacks the same problem from the opposite direction: “It doesn’t define the age of a company, nor does it define the valuation of the company or even their production quantity.” Glen Case is willing to let production draw a boundary; Steve Saka refuses to let the word perform that measurement at all. The disagreement could hardly be cleaner: Glen Case lets production help draw a boundary, while Steve Saka refuses to let the word perform that measurement at all. Size belongs in the analysis, but it cannot carry the classification alone.
CHAPTER 29
QUESTION 5 — IS BOUTIQUE A STAGE OR A BUSINESS MODEL?
Every cigar company has a beginning, and that fact has quietly created one of the biggest problems with boutique. New companies are usually small because they are new. They have fewer accounts because they have not opened more accounts yet, produce fewer cigars because demand has not justified larger production, have deeply involved owners because there may be nobody else available to do the work, and have narrow distribution because distribution takes time to build.
Those characteristics look remarkably boutique, but what happens if the company succeeds? Pete Johnson, Founder of Tatuaje Cigars, has little difficulty answering that question for his own company: “As a company, Tatuaje is no longer boutique. I would classify Tatuaje as mid-tier. Not big, not small, somewhere stuck in the middle. In purgatory.”
Individual Tatuaje releases can still be small-batch or boutique in production, but Pete Johnson separates those cigars from the classification of the company itself. His broader observation is even more revealing: “I think that everyone started boutique and eventually some found a rhythm and success with the retailers, and most importantly the consumers, and we moved out of the boutique space.”
That is boutique as a stage. Under Pete Johnson’s interpretation, a company can begin within boutique conditions and then succeed its way out of them. Nothing immoral happened: the cigars did not necessarily deteriorate, the founder did not suddenly stop caring, retailers ordered more cigars, consumers bought them, and the company developed systems capable of meeting demand. The condition changed. Lee Marsh, Co-Founder of Stolen Throne Cigars, sees the same growth and reaches a different conclusion: “Growth is success.”
Lee Marsh’s fuller answer makes clear what he believes growth is allowed to change and what it is not: “Our approach has remained the same since our first cigar dried. Quality and experience over bottom line.” Under that view, production can expand while the governing priority remains intact; the operating condition changes, but the hierarchy of decisions does not have to.
For Lee Marsh, boutique is a mindset and an approach that should not disappear simply because production numbers increase. The constraints surrounding Stolen Throne Cigars have changed since its first cigar, but the philosophy, he argues, has not: quality and experience remain ahead of the bottom line. That is boutique as a business model, or perhaps more accurately, as an operating philosophy. The distinction between Pete Johnson and Lee Marsh cannot be solved by deciding which man understands his own company better; they are answering different questions.
Pete Johnson is asking what kind of company Tatuaje has become, whereas Lee Marsh is asking whether the behavior that defined Stolen Throne Cigars’ beginning still governs it. One is classifying structure; the other is classifying conduct. Nick Perdomo Jr., President of Perdomo Cigars, adds the lifecycle perspective from a company that has traveled far beyond startup conditions: “The boutique name has changed a lot. It used to be a start-up who produced their own cigars in small quantities.” Nick Perdomo Jr. includes his own company in that history: “We started that way.”
Nick Perdomo Jr. then emphasizes that they made their own cigars, worked, focused on quality, and built the business into what it is today. Under that history, boutique described a real stage of development. Nick Perdomo Jr. did not have to reject the principles associated with that stage in order to leave the stage itself. That separation is essential: a company can outgrow smallness without outgrowing discipline, and it can outgrow narrow distribution without outgrowing founder involvement.
It can outgrow a startup factory without outgrowing manufacturing control, and it can outgrow boutique as a structural description while retaining behaviors consumers learned to associate with boutique. That is probably why companies resist surrendering the word. The label may begin as a description of operating reality, but over time it becomes attached to identity. Once consumers associate a brand with independence, personality, craftsmanship, experimentation, direct communication, or founder presence, growth does not instantly erase those associations.
The company changes faster than its identity does, creating what might be called the boutique graduation problem. If boutique is a stage, success should eventually move companies out of it. If boutique is a business model, success should not matter as long as the company continues behaving according to the same principles. If boutique is an identity, the market may continue applying the word long after the original operating conditions disappear.
Jonathan Drew represents the persistent-identity side of that problem almost perfectly: “Drew Estate has thrived on many fronts, but we may never truly leave the boutique label behind.” That is not a statement about current factory size; it is a statement about the remarkable half-life of identity. A company can leave its original operating condition years before the market is willing to retire the story attached to it.
All three versions exist in the premium cigar industry, and they cannot all classify companies in the same way. Pete Johnson’s distinction between Tatuaje and its individual releases makes the problem even more interesting: a company itself may no longer be boutique while continuing to produce cigars that could reasonably be described as boutique production. That means the category may not even belong at one level. Is boutique describing the company, the factory, the brand, the particular release, the production method, or the philosophy behind it? A mature company can make a tiny experimental batch, while a tiny company can make a completely conventional cigar through a large contract factory. One is large producing small; the other is small producing through large.
Calling the second automatically boutique while denying the first even the possibility begins to reward corporate dimensions rather than the thing the word was supposedly created to recognize. There is another reason the stage question has become harder: modern companies do not all begin from the same starting line.
Michael Herklots, Co-Founder of Ferio Tego Cigars, reduces the lifecycle assumption to its simplest form: “Everyone was a boutique once.” If boutique merely describes the narrow conditions surrounding a beginning, that is almost unavoidable. The harder question is whether every beginning deserves the same description when founders arrive with radically different experience, recognition, access, and expectations.
Some founders enter with years of industry experience, already know retailers, have worked for major manufacturers, understand blending and tobacco, or have access to established factories before their first box reaches a store. Others enter with substantial audiences, media visibility, capital, or reputations earned elsewhere.
Michael Herklots experienced that problem directly with Ferio Tego: “Many retailers and consumers approached Ferio Tego with opinions already formed, rather than with the innocent curiosity most startups enjoy.” A company can be structurally young while its founders are anything but unknown. Modern visibility can eliminate the obscurity that once helped define the traditional boutique path. “Along with the advantage of experience comes the disadvantage of unrealistic expectations, as well as inherited historical bias.”
The traditional story of a boutique company slowly emerging from obscurity no longer describes every new company.
Ian Reith, Founder of Dapper Cigars, states the modern version plainly: “There’s multiple ways to enter the market today.” That sentence sounds obvious until it is placed beside a category whose mythology still assumes one familiar path from obscurity to recognition. The route itself has diversified.
A business can be new without being unknown, a company can be small without being inexperienced, and a brand can have national visibility before it has national distribution.
David West, Founder of Avowed Cigar Company, describes that kind of head start with a chess metaphor: “A brand entering the market with experience and pre-established relationships acts more like a bishop with more paths available to them.” The extra paths are real advantages, but they also make the old startup template less useful. Two companies can be equally young and begin with completely different ranges of motion.
Boutique therefore cannot simply mean young, nor can it simply mean small. Pete Johnson, Lee Marsh, and Nick Perdomo Jr. expose three parts of the same lifecycle: boutique can describe where a company begins, how a company chooses to operate, or remain attached to the company after the original conditions change. That is not necessarily hypocrisy; it is evidence that the word has crossed from business classification into identity. And once that happens, leaving boutique becomes much harder than entering it. A company does not merely have to grow; the market has to notice that the thing it has been calling boutique is no longer the thing it originally thought it was describing.
By the end of this section, that is the central problem. Boutique is not empty language; it is overloaded language that can point toward craft, process, scale, independence, authorship, history, perception, company maturity, and operating philosophy. Those ideas overlap often enough for the word to remain recognizable and diverge often enough to prevent the word from functioning cleanly as a classification. A better dictionary definition cannot end the argument. The next step is to look at the businesses themselves: if boutique cannot reliably tell us what kind of company we are looking at, then the company has to tell us.