ACT VI — WHAT REMAINS WITHOUT THE WORD
CHAPTER 44
QUESTION 20 — WHAT REMAINS WHEN THE WORD BOUTIQUE IS REMOVED?
I should probably admit what I thought boutique meant before I started asking everybody else. I thought I had a pretty good idea. To me, a boutique cigar company was a relatively small operation, somewhere around a million cigars a year, give or take. That was never meant to be a scientific cutoff; it was more of a neighborhood. The company had enough production to be established, enough notoriety that serious cigar smokers knew the name, but it was nowhere near the scale of the industry's major manufacturers.
There was also something else attached to it that was harder to measure. The company had a following, not merely customers. People followed the releases, knew the blends, knew the owner or blender, and knew which factory made the cigars. They argued about the best sizes, waited for certain releases, and knew when something unusual was coming. There was a little cigar-nerd nirvana surrounding the brand.
The company had also entered what I thought of as the boutique vernacular. When knowledgeable cigar people talked about the great boutiques, certain names naturally came up. Nobody needed to stop the conversation and establish annual production, ownership structure, factory capacity, distribution footprint, and an organizational chart before allowing the word to be used. We seemed to know what we meant. Or at least I thought we did.
That was roughly the definition I carried into this project: small but established, independent, recognizable, respected, personally connected to its products and customers, large enough to have made an impact, but not large enough to feel institutional. Then I started asking questions. Funny enough, I am now less certain what boutique means than I was when I began. There is something mildly ridiculous about spending this much time studying a word only to become less confident about using it. Usually, research is supposed to narrow things down, but this one kept opening doors.
Every answer produced another qualification. Size mattered, except when it did not. Independence mattered, except when companies operating within larger organizations still behaved in ways people described as boutique. Owning the factory mattered to some people, while others pointed to brands producing excellent cigars through factories they did not own. Limited production mattered until somebody asked how limited. Founder involvement mattered until we encountered larger companies whose founders remained deeply involved. Craft mattered, but craft was hardly exclusive to small manufacturers. Scarcity mattered, except scarcity could be caused by rare tobacco, limited capacity, deliberate restraint, or somebody simply deciding to make fewer boxes.
At some point, the definition started resembling one of those arguments where everybody knows exactly what they mean until somebody asks them to explain it. I came out of this project more confident about what boutique is not than what it is. It is relatively easy for a company to say, "We are not boutique."
Pete Johnson, Founder of Tatuaje Cigars, can describe Tatuaje as a mid-sized independent company, and I understand immediately what he means. Mid-sized tells me something; independent tells me something. Put the two together and I have a reasonably useful description of the company without needing a committee meeting. I have become increasingly comfortable with that kind of language: mid-sized independent, small independent, founder-led, family-owned, vertically integrated, contract manufactured, nationally distributed, limited production.
Those descriptions have boundaries. They may still require explanation, but at least they identify the characteristic being discussed. Boutique usually requires a second question: boutique because of what? Size, independence, production, factory ownership, founder involvement, distribution, scarcity, packaging, culture, tobacco, personality? Because the owner answers his own telephone? Because the company has a devoted following? Because it makes strange things nobody else would make? Because somebody called it boutique fifteen years ago and nobody ever bothered to ask whether the description still fit?
That is a lot of work for one adjective. I am probably with Pete Johnson at this point: mid-sized independent is easier to understand. There are fewer parameters to argue about, and nothing valuable has been surrendered. A company does not stop being creative because it stops calling itself boutique. It does not lose its independence, nor does it lose its relationships. It can still make small-batch cigars, experiment, protect particular tobaccos, know its retailers personally, maintain direct relationships with consumers, reject opportunities that do not make sense, and move quickly because decisions do not have to climb through five floors of corporate approval.
It can still possess virtually every characteristic somebody else associates with boutique. It simply no longer has to prove that those characteristics somehow add up to membership in a category nobody can define the same way twice. In retrospect, I probably should have picked an easier topic. I could have let whatever irritated me at the cigar show pass and gone on with my life like a sensible person. Instead, I decided I was going to figure out what everybody meant when they kept using this word.
That went well. Twenty questions, more than fifty industry voices, manufacturers large and small, companies that embraced the term, companies that rejected it, companies that outgrew it, companies that may never have fit it in the first place, and historical perspectives stretching back decades. After all of that, my definition became less certain, but something else became much clearer: the qualities underneath boutique are considerably easier to identify than boutique itself.
I stopped asking only what boutique meant and started asking what would happen if we removed the word completely. Not banned it, not declared it fraudulent, not demanded that every cigar company surrender its boutique credentials and report to whatever government agency would inevitably be created to administer such nonsense. Just remove it for a moment: what would actually disappear?
Very little.
The tobacco would still be there. The cigar would still be there. The people making it would still be there. The retailer would still be there. The consumer would still be there. A company would still have a size whether anybody called it boutique or not. It would still have an ownership structure, and it would still manufacture its own cigars or have somebody else manufacture them. It would still have access to certain tobaccos and not others.
Some companies would still possess enormous inventories of aged tobacco, while others would work with much smaller inventories and particular lots. Some founders would still participate in nearly every decision, while others would lead organizations in which responsibilities were spread among dozens or hundreds of people. Some companies would still produce fifty thousand cigars, while others would produce five million. Some would still choose to stop at fifty thousand even if they could sell more.
Some would desperately want to make five million cigars and discover that wanting to make five million cigars and being capable of making five million good cigars are two very different things.
Boutique does not alter any of that. The word describes; the company still has to operate. Pete Johnson may have provided the simplest answer to this question without even being asked about boutique. When the Premium Cigar Association asked him what accounted for Tatuaje's long-term success, Pete Johnson answered: “Good cigars. “It has nothing to do with me.”
After everything we have examined, that answer is almost irritatingly simple, but there is much more behind those two words. Pete Johnson immediately acknowledged that developing a blend is only the beginning. Other people have to reproduce it correctly, the proper tobacco has to remain available, production has to produce the same result repeatedly, and consistency has to survive long after the original excitement of creating the cigar is gone.
That is the part consumers rarely see. Someone has to find the tobacco, understand it, decide when it is ready, blend it, and teach other people how to reproduce that blend. Someone has to catch the cigar that is not right, and somebody has to decide whether the tobacco available this year can reproduce what was made last year. Somebody eventually has to say no: no, this tobacco is not ready; no, this blend is not right; no, we cannot make as many as sales would like; no, we are not releasing this yet.
The band may change, the box may change, the marketing campaign may change, but the people doing the work still have to get the cigar right. I have spent enough time around this business to know how easy it is to fall in love with everything surrounding a cigar. I have done it. A great story makes the cigar more interesting; history makes it more interesting; knowing the person who blended it can make the experience more interesting; a beautiful band can make you want to pick up the cigar; a limited release can make you want it before somebody else gets it.
None of those things is imaginary. They are part of why premium cigars are more interesting than anonymous consumer products. But eventually somebody puts fire to the foot. Then the cigar gets its turn. Boutique cannot make the cigar burn correctly, improve mediocre tobacco, create balance where there is none, replace aging, rescue a blend that should have remained on the table, or make a bad cigar good because only five hundred boxes were produced. Eventually the cigar has to defend everybody who spoke on its behalf. James Brown, Founder of Black Label Trading Company and Black Works Studio, provided a fuller answer that helped me understand another part of what remains after the terminology disappears: “The branding becomes an extension of the person behind it. “This authenticity cannot be faked. “People see that from a mile away.”
I believe that. Authenticity is another one of those words cigar people throw around constantly, but James Brown's point is less sentimental than it sounds. A company eventually develops a pattern. Consumers learn what it makes, how it behaves, whether every release feels like it came from the same creative voice, or whether the company simply follows whatever happens to be popular. They learn whether the story surrounding the cigar and the cigar itself belong together. Branding can amplify identity, but it cannot manufacture one indefinitely. The pattern remains whether the company is boutique or not. Andre Farkas, Founder of Viaje Cigars, gets even closer to the actual beginning of the cigar: “We begin with the tobacco itself, or simply with curiosity, with a particular leaf, a farm, or even a single bale that suggests possibility.”
There is something about that sentence I keep coming back to. It does not begin with a category, a sales projection, a price point, or a hole somebody identified in the portfolio. It begins with tobacco, or curiosity, or one bale that might become something. Andre Farkas also described what happens when that possibility does not cooperate: the project can wait, or it can disappear.
One of the least visible forms of craftsmanship is restraint. We see what companies release; we do not see everything they rejected. The cigar that never reached the market leaves no evidence, nor does the blend that needed another year, nor does the tobacco somebody decided was not good enough. There is no Instagram photograph of the cigar a manufacturer wisely chose not to make. Restraint has terrible marketing.
Yet it may be one of the clearest indicators of whether the cigar or the business is driving the decision. A company can call itself boutique and release everything it thinks it can sell. Another company can reject the term completely and decide that the tobacco is not right, so there will be no cigar. Which one behaved more like the romantic idea people associate with boutique? That is exactly why the label stops helping: the behavior tells me more. Nicholas Melillo, Founder of Foundation Cigar Company, strips the issue down even further: “At the end of the day, ‘boutique’ doesn’t define how a cigar is made. “What matters is tobacco, fermentation, aging, and the discipline to maintain a blend over time.”
One of the industry's more romantic assumptions deserves some pushback here: smaller is not automatically better. Smaller can mean more control, more flexibility, and closer involvement, but it can also mean less tobacco, less inventory, less capital, and less leverage with growers. It can mean less ability to hold five or ten years of a particular leaf. Those are not moral failures; they are operating realities.
Larger companies can face the opposite problem. Their infrastructure can become a machine that demands to be fed. Volume can begin making decisions that tobacco once made, sales expectations can pressure production, and a portfolio can become too large to protect every cigar equally. But scale can also provide advantages: inventory can protect consistency, capital can buy patience, and long-term relationships can protect tobacco access. A large aging inventory can allow a company to maintain a blend instead of substituting another tobacco because the original leaf ran out.
Infrastructure can protect quality. The premium cigar industry sometimes treats inconvenience as evidence of authenticity. I am no longer convinced that is useful. There is nothing particularly noble about lacking the resources necessary to make the cigar correctly. The better question is what the company does with the resources it has. Does the infrastructure protect the cigar, or does the cigar eventually get changed to protect the infrastructure? That test tells me much more than boutique. Skip Martin, Co-Founder of RoMa Craft Tobac, brings the discussion back to the person who ultimately finances all of this: the smoker. “ “Instead of clinging to the term, we choose to focus on delivering value: good cigars at a fair price.”
There is an admirable absence of romance in that sentence. The consumer does not buy our classification system; he buys the cigar and spends the money. That creates a very simple relationship between promise and delivery: was the cigar worth what he paid? That does not mean inexpensive: a twenty-dollar cigar can represent excellent value, whereas a ten-dollar cigar can be a terrible value. Rare tobacco costs money, aging costs money, skilled labor costs money, small production can cost money, and packaging costs money. Running a cigar company apparently costs money every time somebody opens a door.
Fair price is not synonymous with cheap. Value means the experience justified the price. That judgment ultimately belongs to the smoker. The company can explain, the reviewer can score, the retailer can recommend, and the marketing department can perform whatever interpretive dance has been scheduled for that particular release. The smoker still gets the last vote, and he is perfectly capable of casting it without knowing whether we classified the manufacturer correctly.
Ernesto Pérez-Carrillo, Founder of Casa Carrillo, brings another element into the discussion that I do not want to lose when the boutique label is removed: reputation. Looking back at the earlier generation of smaller companies, Ernesto Pérez-Carrillo said: “Brands had to build slowly, almost cigar by cigar, line by line, through reputation and personal recommendation. “Word of mouth was all we had.”
The world he describes barely exists anymore. Information moves instantly, and a new company can introduce itself to thousands of smokers before the first shipment reaches every retailer. Social media, cigar media, podcasts, festivals, events, factory trips, and direct communication have completely changed how quickly a brand can become visible. But visibility and reputation are not the same thing.
A company can acquire attention very quickly, but it cannot acquire history very quickly. It can announce a cigar instantly, but it cannot manufacture five years of consumer experience instantly. It can purchase advertising, but it cannot purchase the memory of a retailer who has reordered the product for ten years because customers keep asking for it. It cannot buy the accumulated confidence of smokers who have opened box after box and found the product consistent. It cannot speed up that part.
The first cigar matters, so does the fiftieth, and so does the cigar somebody buys years after the company is no longer new. Eventually reputation becomes the brand whether the company likes it or not. People remember whether the product delivered, retailers remember whether it sold, and they remember whether the manufacturer answered when there was a problem. They remember whether the fifth shipment resembled the first, and they remember whether promises were kept.
That is an old mechanism operating through new technology. Ernesto Pérez-Carrillo's cigar-by-cigar world became faster, but it did not disappear. Erik Espinosa, President of Espinosa Premium Cigars, adds another part of the equation that I do not want to lose when the label disappears: proximity. Erik Espinosa built much of his business through social media, events, and direct contact with consumers, and he continues to maintain relationships with people who were there when the company was much smaller. He does not talk about that connection as some burden success placed on him; he sees the ability to remain connected to those people as a privilege.
The people who support a company early take a chance on it before success makes the decision easy. They buy the cigars when the name is still being built, tell their friends, ask retailers to bring the product in, attend events, follow the company, and come back. Success naturally changes the relationship: there are more retailers, more consumers, more employees, and more demands on everybody's time. Nobody should pretend that a founder can maintain exactly the same relationship with every smoker when the business becomes many times larger than it was at the beginning.
But distance does not have to become indifference. A company can become larger without forgetting who helped carry it there. That relationship is difficult to put on a production chart because it has nothing to do with annual volume, factory ownership, or vertical integration. It is memory: who was there when nobody knew the name? Who bought the cigar when the company needed somebody willing to take a chance? Who brought friends to the table? Who asked the retailer to give the brand a shot? Who showed up? Who came back?
That history belongs to the company too. If boutique has sometimes been used to describe closeness between the people behind a cigar and the people smoking it, Erik Espinosa's experience demonstrates that growth does not automatically require that closeness to disappear. The word can disappear, but the relationship does not have to. Then there is Steve Saka, Founder of Dunbarton Tobacco & Trust.
Steve Saka did not make life particularly easy for anyone hoping this project would end with a clean definition. His opinion of the word itself was established much earlier and does not need to be repeated here. But another part of his original answer becomes considerably more important at the end of the inquiry than it was at the beginning: “No brand should ever function as anything but being a great company and brand always regardless of legacy, size or some made up marketing moniker.”
There it is. Remove the moniker and nothing important disappears. Pete Johnson leaves us with good cigars and the people, tobacco, and consistency required to reproduce them. James Brown leaves us with authenticity that has to survive beyond the branding. Andre Farkas leaves us with curiosity, tobacco, and the willingness to let a project die when the material does not justify it. Nicholas Melillo leaves us with tobacco, fermentation, aging, and discipline.
Skip Martin leaves us with value. Ernesto Pérez-Carrillo leaves us with reputation earned cigar by cigar. Erik Espinosa leaves us with proximity, and with the idea that growth does not require a company to forget the people who helped carry it there. Success can increase the distance between a company and its consumers, but it does not have to erase the relationship. Steve Saka leaves us with the responsibility to be a great company regardless of what anybody decides to call it.
That is a remarkable amount of agreement from people who cannot agree on boutique. And perhaps that is where this inquiry has been pointing all along. The disagreement should not be cleaned up for the convenience of my conclusion. These manufacturers do not share one definition: some believe boutique remains meaningful, some see it as mindset, some see craft, some see size, some see culture, some see independence, and some see direct involvement. Some believe a company can grow beyond boutique while continuing to make boutique-style products, while others believe the characteristics associated with boutique can survive almost any amount of growth. Some think the market has stretched the word so far that it is becoming useless.
Steve Saka would probably prefer we stop bothering him with it altogether. The disagreement is real, but remove the word and something interesting happens: much of the disagreement disappears.
Companies still have to choose tobacco, decide how to ferment it, decide how long to age it, and someone still has to blend the cigar, roll it, inspect it, and decide whether an imperfect project gets released or abandoned.
Companies still have to decide how much to produce, where to sell, how to price, how to support retailers, how to treat consumers, how quickly to grow, what compromises to accept, what opportunities to reject, whether every good idea needs to become another SKU, whether more is always better, and whether success means becoming larger or simply becoming better at what they already chose to do. Those are real decisions that create real differences between companies.
The industry does not need the word boutique to recognize those choices. Craft, control, intentionality, originality, patience, consistency, authorship, restraint, relationships, professionalism, reputation, value, accountability, and quality remain visible without it. No production number guarantees them, no factory size eliminates them, and no label can substitute for them.
That does not make boutique meaningless. It survived because it has been trying to describe real qualities, but too many of them accumulated under one word. One person sees scale, another ethos, another the founder, factory, tobacco, or consumer relationship. They may all be describing something true while measuring different things.
Once those characteristics are separated, the conversation gets easier. Tell me the company is small, independent, vertically integrated, founder-led, broadly distributed, deliberately limited, tobacco-constrained, or built around a separate production protocol. Those descriptions can coexist because they do not pretend to be interchangeable.
Tell me what actually happens. A company can be small but not independent, independent but not vertically integrated, vertically integrated but enormous, large but founder-led, founder-led but broadly distributed, broadly distributed but extremely disciplined about production, limited without being small, small without being limited, or craft-driven without calling itself boutique.
That reality is what changed my own thinking. I began with a mental picture around a million cigars: independent, established but not big, recognizable, respected, and surrounded by a devoted following. I still recognize that company when I see it; I am simply less certain that recognizing it gives me authority to define everybody else.
If Pete Johnson tells me Tatuaje is a mid-sized independent cigar company, I may know more from that description than I would from boutique. Nothing important has been taken away from the company or its cigars.
The word can still serve as cultural shorthand, but serious analytical use requires the next sentence. If a retailer, manufacturer, or consumer calls something boutique, based on what?
If a retailer tells me a cigar is boutique, I now want the next sentence: why? If a manufacturer calls itself boutique, what does that mean inside the operation? If a consumer describes a company as boutique, what characteristic is he responding to? Maybe it is the founder, the factory, scarcity, independence, the story, or the process. Maybe it is simply the wonderful feeling that he discovered the cigar before his friends did.
After listening to the people who build these companies, make the cigars, sell them, grow them, and live with the consequences, I am less interested in forcing consensus than in forcing precision.
Tell me what the company actually is, how it operates, who controls the cigar, what it protects when growth creates pressure, what it refuses to compromise, and whether the cigar delivers. Classification should follow those facts rather than substitute for them. With those facts separated, I can finally state the definition I am willing to use.