ACT II — WHAT EXACTLY ARE WE CLASSIFYING?
CHAPTER 30
QUESTION 6 — ARE WE CLASSIFYING THE COMPANY OR THE CIGAR?
One of the reasons boutique becomes difficult to define is that the industry does not always agree on what is being classified. A company can be boutique, a brand can be boutique, a factory can be boutique, a production can be boutique, and, somehow, the individual cigar can be boutique too. Those statements are often used interchangeably even though they describe entirely different things. The problem becomes unavoidable once mature companies begin producing limited projects and small brands begin contracting production through much larger factories. If the company determines the classification, the answer follows the organization; if the cigar determines it, the answer may change from one release to another.
René Castaneda, President of Villiger North America, approaches boutique largely from the cigar itself. His criteria are unusually concrete: he associates boutique with very limited production, often around ten thousand cigars or fewer, but he does not stop at quantity. The cigar should bring something different to the market, which may involve unusual tobacco, a specialized production process, or an idea that is not simply following an existing marketing trend.
René Castaneda also draws a line between distinction and trend-following: "The cigar doesn’t follow any marketing trend." That does not make every contrarian cigar boutique, but it adds intention to his cigar-level definition. The product should be different because somebody made a different choice, not because the market happened to reward a different costume. "The cigar is bringing something new to the table."
That formulation shifts the unit of measurement. Villiger is not a small startup manufacturer, yet René Castaneda’s definition leaves room for an individual cigar to possess boutique characteristics because of the way that particular cigar is conceived and produced. Under that model, the company does not have to be boutique for the cigar to be boutique.
Terence Reilly’s broader vocabulary reinforces the same point: "Boutique is poorly defined but the word is usually associated with terms like specialized, artisanal, unique, experimental." Those words describe characteristics of a production far more easily than they describe an entire corporation. The adjective becomes more coherent when the noun after it is identified.
Tom Lazuka, Co-Founder of Asylum Cigars, creates the opposite problem: "Asylum is obviously a niche market due to the large ring gauges, but the reality is we make a wide variety of vitolas."
The brand maintains a highly recognizable identity. Consumers know what Asylum represents, and that identity can still create the impression of a specialized company operating somewhere outside the conventional mainstream. Then Tom Lazuka provides the number that disrupts the impression: "From the outside we still look like a boutique brand, but Asylum has built up to close to 3.5 million cigars a year."
That is not a tiny operation. Tom Lazuka does not describe the infrastructure behind that growth as an artistic surrender; he sees it as an advantage. Greater capability gives Asylum freedom to be creative while maintaining the product at a level the company considers first class. Now the classification problem becomes visible. If Asylum is judged as a company, millions of cigars and substantial infrastructure push it away from many traditional boutique definitions. If a specific Asylum project is judged as a cigar, production method, experimentation, specialized identity, or limited availability could pull that particular release back toward the category. Both descriptions can be internally consistent; they are simply classifying different objects. The premium cigar industry moves between those objects constantly.
Calling a cigar "from a boutique company" may tell us more about the organization than the cigar. The production itself might resemble work made for much larger brands, while a large company can isolate tobacco, authorize a tiny run, use an unusual process, and give a blender considerable freedom. The corporation did not shrink; the production changed.
The cigar itself might have been produced under conditions nearly identical to products made for much larger brands. The reverse is equally possible. A large company can isolate tobacco, authorize a tiny production, use an unusual process, give a blender considerable freedom, and make something bearing almost every characteristic commonly associated with boutique production. The corporation did not shrink while the cigars were being rolled; the production changed. That separation creates a problem for anyone trying to use boutique as a clean company classification. A company is relatively stable: it has ownership, employees, production relationships, distribution, revenue, infrastructure, and history.
A cigar is temporary. It can be experimental, limited, or use tobacco unavailable for anything larger. It can be created outside the normal production system of the company responsible for it, and it can disappear after five hundred boxes. When the same word is used to describe both the enduring organization and the temporary product, contradictions become inevitable. The cleanest example already appeared through Pete Johnson: Tatuaje, in his view, is no longer a boutique company, yet Tatuaje can still make small-batch boutique product.
Once company, brand, and cigar are allowed to separate, the combinations multiply quickly. The exercise matters because it establishes one rule: they are separate units of analysis, and boutique does not automatically travel from one level to another.
Treating the levels separately is not evasive; it may actually be more precise than forcing the whole company and every cigar it produces into the same category. René Castaneda’s answer reinforces the cigar side of the same split, while Tom Lazuka demonstrates how far the company can move while parts of its market identity remain attached to an earlier image. The question is therefore not simply whether something is boutique, but identifying the thing being classified: the company, the factory, the brand, the line, the individual production, or the cigar itself? Until that is made explicit, two people can argue endlessly about boutique while technically discussing different subjects. The industry has spent years doing exactly that.
CHAPTER 31
QUESTION 7 — CAN THE SAME FACTORY MAKE BOTH A BOUTIQUE AND A NON-BOUTIQUE CIGAR?
If the answer to the previous question is that the cigar and the company are not necessarily the same unit of classification, then the next question becomes almost unavoidable: can one factory make both? Abdel “AJ” Fernandez, Founder of AJ Fernandez Cigars, provides one of the strongest real-world tests in the entire boutique discussion because his operation refuses to fit neatly into the expected categories. AJ Fernandez does not operate a tiny workshop making a few cigars for a handful of retailers; his manufacturing operation is substantial, producing his own brands while also working with companies of very different sizes and identities.
Steve Saka supplies the uncomfortable industrial fact behind that argument: "Most cigars, particularly the smallest brands, are made at large, well-established factories." Once that is true, factory scale and brand scale cannot be treated as interchangeable measurements. The small label on the box may be sitting on top of a very large manufacturing system.
AJ Fernandez does not avoid that contradiction: "It doesn't matter how large your factory becomes, how much production you handle, or the blends you make for big or small brands."
His conclusion is that the cigar can retain what he considers boutique character through the work itself: "It will always have a boutique soul and heart because of the dedication you put into your craftsmanship." The claim is sweeping, but at least the proposed standard is visible. AJ Fernandez is locating the distinction in discipline applied to the product, not in the square footage surrounding it.
He reduces the argument further: "Because size does not matter. What matters is dedication and discipline."
There is an obvious objection: if size does not matter at all, then boutique stops functioning as a size classification. That may be exactly what AJ Fernandez's answer forces the industry to confront. A factory is infrastructure: it contains people, tobacco, fermentation capacity, aging inventory, production lines, bunchers, rollers, supervisors, quality-control systems, and whatever knowledge has accumulated inside the organization. None of those things requires every cigar made inside the building to be conceived the same way. A kitchen can make a tasting menu and feed a banquet without becoming two kitchens; the relevant difference is what the people inside it are being asked to do. Terence Reilly states the process test much more explicitly: "A boutique cigar is defined by the process rather than the name."
Terence Reilly gives the example of Cohiba Miami, which he would still consider boutique because of the production environment at El Titan de Bronze.
He is willing to apply that logic to a name that no one would confuse with a tiny startup: "I would still consider the Cohiba Miami a boutique cigar because it was made at Titan." That example is useful precisely because the brand name pulls in one direction while the production environment pulls in another.
The brand name does not settle the classification; the process does. Terence Reilly then takes the argument into larger factories: "A small company can certainly go to a larger one and create something boutique using bales which have a distinct flavor but are not numerous enough to produce large runs."
Factory scale and cigar-level production are different measurements. The size of the factory tells us how much the factory can produce, but it does not necessarily tell us how a particular cigar was produced. A large manufacturer can possess a handful of distinctive tobacco that could never support mass production. A blender can isolate that tobacco, construct a specific project around it, limit the run because the material itself imposes the limitation, and supervise the cigar differently from the ordinary production surrounding it. Nothing about the square footage of the building changes that. Terence Reilly also supplies the necessary warning against taking this argument too far: "If a large manufacturer takes some overruns and sells them to a small brand… that is at best superficially boutique."
The phrase sets a hard limit: a small company name does not purify an ordinary cigar, and the label on the box cannot reverse-engineer the process. This creates a much more useful distinction than large factory versus small factory.
James Brown attacks the same loophole from the brand side: "If you’re white labeling products out of a mass production factory, using the same tobacco they use in mass production cigars but you’re making small batches and you have cool branding, does that make the product boutique? It definitely does not." Small ownership, limited quantity, and attractive presentation therefore cannot substitute for a distinct production relationship.
The production itself has to be distinct. Was the tobacco selected specifically for the project? Was the blend actually developed for the brand? Was the production intentionally limited because of material or process? Did the people responsible for the cigar exercise meaningful authority over what was made? Or did somebody locate available inventory, place another band around it, and construct boutique identity afterward? Those are not the same business.
AJ Fernandez and Terence Reilly arrive at the question from different directions, but their answers overlap substantially. AJ Fernandez argues that a large operation does not automatically erase craftsmanship, while Terence Reilly argues that large infrastructure can produce genuinely specialized work, but only when the underlying process earns the distinction. Together they demolish one of the easiest assumptions surrounding boutique: factory size alone cannot tell us what the cigar is. In fact, knowing the name of the factory may tell us considerably less than consumers assume.
The same factory can produce a cigar for a major established company, a cigar for a small independent brand, a limited experiment, a permanent national line, and a project using tobacco scarce enough to support only a small production. The walls do not classify the cigars; the work inside them might. That conclusion also carries a warning for small brands: contract manufacturing at a respected factory can provide extraordinary tobacco access, knowledge, consistency, and production capability, but it cannot manufacture authenticity on behalf of the brand owner. If the small company exercises little authority over the blend, tobacco, standards, or finished product, the mere fact that the company itself is small tells us almost nothing. The industry has spent considerable energy asking whether a factory is too large to make boutique cigars, but it may have been looking at the wrong end of the equation. A better question is whether the factory can separate one production from another with enough intention, tobacco distinction, oversight, and discipline that the individual cigar actually deserves to be classified differently. AJ Fernandez says scale does not prevent it, and Terence Reilly explains why.
CHAPTER 32
QUESTION 8 — WHERE DOES CONTROL OF THE CIGAR ACTUALLY LIVE?
A premium cigar can pass through an extraordinary number of hands before the smoker ever sees it. Someone selects seed, plants it, manages the field, cures the tobacco, ferments it, sorts it, ages it, develops a blend, owns the factory, supervises production, approves the cigar, owns the brand, distributes it, and finally sells it.
Then everybody talks about "the maker" as though one person did all of that before lunch.
If boutique is supposed to imply control, the obvious question is where that control actually resides. Justo Eiroa, President of JRE Tobacco, begins answering the question before there is a cigar to control. His operation is vertically integrated, giving the company authority over the varieties it plants, including the tobaccos used in the Aladino portfolio. It gives the company the ability to determine how those tobaccos are fermented and how slowly the pilones are managed. Rather than defining boutique directly, Justo Eiroa describes what actual control allows him to do: "Being vertically integrated and controlling the varieties we plant definitely allows us to create and prepare very original blends and tobaccos."
Justo Eiroa ties that authority directly to patience in fermentation: "It also allows us to manage the pilones slowly and gently, without accelerating the process." Control is meaningful because it creates the ability to wait. Vertical integration is not impressive merely because more stages belong to the same company; it matters when that control changes what the company is willing or able to do.
The implication is significant: control begins in agriculture. By the time somebody sits at a blending table, many of the most consequential decisions have already been made. The available tobacco carries the consequences of seed selection, soil, weather, curing, fermentation, aging, sorting, and inventory decisions made months or years earlier. A company controlling those stages possesses a form of authority that a brand buying finished production from another manufacturer simply does not possess.
That does not automatically make the vertically integrated company better, but it makes its control different. Sam Phillips, President of La Palina Cigars, approaches the question from nearly the opposite end of the production chain, separating manufacture from stewardship: "To me, ownership of the vision, blending philosophy, quality control standards, distribution, and consumer relationship is what defines a cigar brand."
Manufacturing remains critical in his description, but manufacturing and brand stewardship are not identical jobs. His clearest formulation is even simpler: "A factory can make a cigar. A brand creates a reason for a consumer to seek that cigar out repeatedly."
Justo Eiroa and Sam Phillips are not actually contradicting one another; they are identifying different kinds of control. Justo Eiroa describes material control, whereas Sam Phillips describes authorial control. Those functions can exist in one company, or they can be separated. A vertically integrated manufacturer may control seed, field, fermentation, aging, blending, rolling, quality control, packaging, and distribution. At the other extreme, a brand may own no farm and no factory while still determining the concept, approving the blend, rejecting prototypes, establishing quality standards, directing packaging, controlling distribution, and accepting responsibility for the finished cigar.
Neither arrangement eliminates the contribution of the other people involved. The farmer, the factory, the blender, and the brand all remain important. The trouble begins when the industry compresses all of those roles into the word maker and then assumes that the person whose name is most visible must control everything underneath it. Modern premium cigar production does not always work that way.
There are at least three separate forms of authority worth identifying: manufacturing authority concerns who physically produces the cigar and manages the production process; creative authority concerns who decides what the cigar is supposed to become; accountability concerns who owns the result when the finished cigar succeeds or fails. Sometimes one company possesses all three, sometimes two companies divide them, and sometimes the arrangement is more complicated than either side particularly wants to explain in a thirty-second conversation at a trade-show booth.
For boutique classification, the third category may be the most revealing. Somebody has to be accountable. A company cannot claim intimate authorship when the cigar is successful and then disappear into the manufacturing relationship when something goes wrong. If the blend changes, who answers for it? If consistency deteriorates, who notices? If the tobacco no longer behaves the same way, who has enough authority to stop production? If the factory proposes a substitution, who can say no? If the cigar fails to represent what the brand promised, whose failure is it?
Those questions reveal control better than factory ownership alone. Justo Eiroa’s model gives an unusually direct answer because authority remains concentrated from agriculture through production. Sam Phillips demonstrates why concentrated ownership cannot be the only legitimate model: a brand working with another manufacturer can still exercise serious authorship and stewardship if its authority is real rather than ceremonial. Contract manufacturing therefore cannot be dismissed automatically.
Nick Perdomo Jr. draws the opposite boundary much harder: "If you are a boutique maker, you should make your own cigars, not buy them…" His standard is more restrictive than Sam Phillips’s, but that tension is useful because it exposes a real fault line between authorship through stewardship and authorship through physical manufacturing responsibility.
Some of the most important cigar companies in the industry have relied on manufacturing partners at different stages of their histories. The question is not merely who owns the building, but who controls the cigar. Ownership can provide control, but it does not guarantee it; contract production can divide control, but it does not necessarily eliminate it. Responsibility has to remain traceable through the chain: when it can be followed, control has a home, and when it disappears, boutique becomes another story printed on the box.
Contract production creates another test that is easy to overlook: what happens when the relationship ends? Who owns the blend formula, production records, molds, packaging specifications, and tobacco commitments? Can the brand take the cigar to another factory, or does the practical knowledge required to reproduce it remain with the manufacturer? A principal may exercise influence while the relationship is healthy and still discover that very little authority travels with the brand after separation.
Portability is not an absolute requirement because tobacco, people, and process cannot always be duplicated elsewhere. It is nevertheless evidence about where control lives. If the cigar cannot follow the company because the factory possesses the decisive knowledge, materials, or authority, the brand's claim of production control is weaker than its public identity may suggest.
CHAPTER 33
QUESTION 9 — DOES BOUTIQUE REQUIRE INDEPENDENCE?
Independence may be the most emotionally attractive part of boutique. The small company stands outside the machine, the founder answers to nobody, the decisions are personal, and the cigar is protected from committees, quarterly targets, corporate politics, and whatever other horrors humans invented after deciding that a meeting should have another meeting. The story is appealing, but the business reality is more complicated.
Law Ream, Brand Activation Manager for Camacho Cigars, examines that complication through Camacho, whose history crosses exactly the boundary boutique language usually struggles with. Camacho began with an owner-driven identity strongly associated with the Eiroa family, Honduras, and Corojo tobacco. The brand later became part of the much larger Davidoff organization, changing ownership, surrounding resources, and infrastructure. Yet Law Ream rejects the idea that those structural changes automatically erase everything consumers originally recognized in the brand: "True boutique spirit lies less in ownership structure or production size than in maintaining a distinct identity with discipline and consistency."
That is a direct challenge to independence as a requirement. Under Law Ream’s interpretation, institutional ownership does not automatically destroy identity. A brand can become part of a much larger structure while retaining enough character, discipline, product consistency, and historical continuity that consumers still recognize something of the earlier company inside it. The obvious problem is determining how much can change before that argument becomes nostalgia.
Ownership matters because ownership controls incentives. A large parent company can provide capital, tobacco, distribution, administrative infrastructure, marketing support, regulatory support, international reach, purchasing strength, and organizational stability. It can also introduce approval layers, financial expectations, portfolio requirements, and institutional priorities that did not exist when the brand operated independently.
Whether those forces change the cigar depends on what the larger company actually does with its authority. Rick Rodriguez, Founder of West Tampa Tobacco Company, provides the view from the other direction. He left a large corporate environment to build his own company: "The scariest part of leaving a big company to go on your own is taking that first step."
Rick Rodriguez is unusually useful because he does not romanticize independence after obtaining it. Some of the things he missed immediately were precisely the things large companies are good at providing: money to produce, market, and distribute cigars; access to a substantial tobacco library; and an established national sales force.
Rick Rodriguez is explicit about the trade: "Some of the things you are definitely going to miss include money to produce, market and distribute your cigars… access to a large library of tobacco… and an established national salesforce." Independence returns authority to the founder, but it also returns the bill.
Independence did not suddenly make those needs disappear; it changed who had to solve them. A lean company introduces different advantages: Rick Rodriguez describes a smaller operation as forcing focus because there is little room for excess or waste. Existing retailer relationships can open doors, and factory partnerships can provide access to tobacco without requiring the company to own every leaf in the world. But he also acknowledges the limits of reputation: "This history could only go so far."
That sentence should be remembered whenever independence is treated as a substitute for execution. A founder can leave a major company with relationships, experience, credibility, tobacco knowledge, and retailer access, but eventually the new cigar still has to perform. Law Ream and Rick Rodriguez expose independence from opposite directions: Law Ream asks whether identity can survive after independence decreases, while Rick Rodriguez shows what actually disappears when institutional support is voluntarily surrendered.
Taken together, they make independence look less like a moral virtue and more like an operating condition. Independence creates freedom, but it also creates exposure. A founder can make decisions without layers of corporate approval.
Erik Espinosa describes that advantage without pretending it is philosophical theory: "We can do things quickly. We don’t have to do things through channels of approval." That is one of the clearest practical benefits of independence: the distance between decision and action is shorter.
The same founder may also be the person worrying about payroll, production deposits, freight, inventory, sales coverage, marketing costs, retailer support, and whether enough cigars will arrive on time to pay for the next round. Large platforms reduce some forms of freedom, but they also reduce some forms of vulnerability. Boutique mythology often treats constraint as authenticity; a company struggling because it lacks capital may indeed become inventive, or it may simply be undercapitalized. A founder personally driving from account to account may create extraordinary retailer relationships, or he may desperately need a sales representative. A tiny tobacco inventory may force creativity, or it may force compromise. Hardship can shape identity, but it is not automatically evidence of craftsmanship.
Regulatory and compliance burdens create another form of pressure. Registration, reporting, packaging requirements, state distribution rules, and the cost of specialized guidance consume money and attention regardless of company size. A smaller manufacturer may accept a distributor, platform, or outside partner partly because remaining administratively independent has become too expensive. That decision does not automatically end boutique, but it can move discretion away from the people closest to the cigar. The classification turns on what authority moved with the paperwork.
The Camacho case creates the opposite warning: institutional resources can protect a brand, or they can consume it. An acquisition can preserve tobacco identity, product standards, history, and market character, or it could eventually leave little more than a familiar trademark attached to an entirely different operating philosophy. Corporate ownership therefore cannot be treated as neutral: it changes the environment in which authority, incentives, and discretion operate, sometimes dramatically. But ownership alone still does not tell us what survived.
The better distinction is to ask what independence was protecting in the first place: creative authority, speed of decision-making, founder involvement, product discipline, the ability to reject a commercial compromise, or a recognizable identity? If those conditions survive inside a larger ownership structure, then something meaningful survived with them; if they do not, the ownership change may have altered the classification. The result has to be established rather than assumed, and whether a particular cigar or production still qualifies as boutique remains a separate question.
CHAPTER 34
QUESTION 10 — CAN SOMETHING BE BOUTIQUE IF IT IS EVERYWHERE?
Boutique has always carried some relationship with discovery: the consumer finds something outside the ordinary rotation, or the retailer introduces a cigar not sitting in every humidor in the country. The brand feels personal partly because the smoker has not been surrounded by it for years. Scarcity may not define boutique, but it certainly helped create the feeling. So, what happens when everybody knows the name? Paolo Garzaroli, President of Graycliff Cigars, offers one answer by deliberately refusing the premise of ubiquity. Graycliff has chosen to limit its footprint: "Graycliff remains boutique and has taken strides to do that by purposely limiting its footprint in the U.S. to forty retailers and internationally to only a handful of clients."
That is not accidental smallness; it is strategic restraint. Graycliff could pursue broader presence, but Paolo Garzaroli connects the company’s identity with selectivity and experience.
That language moves distribution inside the product architecture itself: access is part of what is being sold. A Graycliff cigar is connected not merely to tobacco and a band, but to place, hospitality, memory, luxury, and controlled availability. The limited footprint reinforces the experience because consumers are not expected to encounter the company everywhere, giving boutique a scarcity component without reducing it to production volume.
The company can remain selective by choice. Dr. Paul B.K. Garmirian supplied a similar historical example earlier through PG Cigars: demand existed and additional accounts were available, but the company consciously refused some of them.
The scale of that choice is clearer in Dr. Paul B.K. Garmirian’s own recollection: "Sales doubled every year from 1991 to 1997 without advertising simply by word of mouth. Demand exceeded supply." Remaining small under those conditions was not an inability to find customers; it was a refusal to convert every available customer into additional scale.
Graycliff reaches the same general principle through a different identity: sometimes not being everywhere is the strategy. Litto Gomez, Founder of La Flor Dominicana Cigars, creates the opposite problem. La Flor Dominicana is not one of the giant multinational cigar companies, yet its cultural presence is enormous. Litto Gomez himself expresses uncertainty about where the company fits: "At this moment we make about 4 million cigars of one brand only, LFD. I don’t know if that would qualify us to be a boutique or if we are too big for that."
Scale and gravity are not the same thing. A company can become culturally enormous before becoming structurally enormous. Consumers may encounter its cigars widely, retailers may know the brand almost universally, its founders may be among the most recognizable people in the industry, and its products may accumulate awards, reputation, loyalty, and decades of consumer memory. At that point, the company can feel much larger than its actual production footprint.
La Flor Dominicana demonstrates why distribution alone cannot describe market presence. A company can sell fewer cigars than another company while occupying considerably more mental territory. The reverse also happens: a manufacturer can produce enormous quantities while remaining relatively invisible to the average consumer because much of its work appears under other names. Boutique therefore has another measurement problem: what does everywhere mean? Everywhere in production, everywhere in retail, everywhere geographically, everywhere in cigar media, everywhere in consumer awareness, or everywhere culturally? Those are not interchangeable. Graycliff deliberately limits physical distribution while retaining a long-established premium identity, whereas La Flor Dominicana possesses broader physical presence and immense cultural recognition while remaining considerably smaller than some multinational competitors.
Graycliff and La Flor Dominicana expose different sides of the same problem: one restricts access as part of its identity, while the other shows that recognition can expand much faster than physical size. Boutique has always benefited from discovery, but discovery is a market experience, not a production method.
A company can become easier to find without surrendering founder involvement, tobacco discipline, or production authority. What changes may be the consumer's experience of scarcity or discovery. That does not necessarily end boutique; it shows that Market Perception and Access can move while other conditions remain.
Ubiquity may therefore matter more to market perception than to craftsmanship. Success is not contamination, and a company should not have to remain obscure to remain credible. But if access and discovery are part of what people mean by boutique, broader distribution has to be examined rather than ignored.
If availability does matter, the industry needs some concept of when broad distribution begins changing the category. Paolo Garzaroli solves the problem through deliberate restriction, while Litto Gomez demonstrates why deliberate restriction cannot become a universal requirement. La Flor Dominicana’s influence became larger than its physical footprint because consumers responded strongly to the cigars and the people behind them. Punishing that recognition by declaring that success automatically destroyed the qualities responsible for it would make boutique a category that rewards obscurity.
That is where the question begins moving from classification toward marketing: once discovery becomes commercially valuable, the market acquires an incentive to manufacture its appearance.