As with a lot of my New World cigar stories, it all starts at the Intertabac trade fair in Dortmund. Prior to 2019, I don’t think I had ever heard of Dapper Cigars. So many great memories and meetings from that show. Dapper Cigars was another brand that Joe discovered. I had noticed the stand and they were constantly busy but hadn’t paid much attention. Joe had chatted with them briefly and liked what they had to say. We had a brief chat with Habib who is Dapper Cigars European Ambassador and got some samples to try later.
It took a while to get through the many samples we brought back from the trade show but, Dapper Cigars was one of those brands that made us sit up when we smoked their cigars. The La Madrina Robusto was a stand out smoke for us. The beautiful dark Ecuadorian Cuban seed Habano wrapper with this cool skeletal hand holding a rose was not only eye catching but the cigar had bags of flavour to boot.
We began chats with Ian Reith (founder of Dapper Cigars) and Habib in mid-2020, to see if our business model was compatible with their expansion and distribution plans for Europe. Coincidentally a friend, Emmanuel of Bosquet Paris (exotic and exclusive humidors and cases) mentioned in a chat, a cigar company he knew in California and also introduced me to Ian.
A year later and we are so proud to introduce our first new brand of 2021, say hello to Dapper Cigars.
WHO ARE DAPPER CIGARS?
Founded in 2013 by Ian Reith. Ian’s love of cigars and launching a cigar brand is not an uncommon story in America. Based in Fresno, California, Ian’s background is tech and software. A quote Ian is famous for, is that “Dapper Cigars was founded with the goal to make just one great cigar for him and his friends”. What started as a small personal project has since grown in to an internationally distributed artisanal cigar brand in 7 years.
It was his next door neighbour, Chris Alvarez, who came up with the name of the brand after seeing the early creations and said, “now that’s a dapper cigar”. The brand name has an old vintage ring to it and that is reflected in the decoration of the boxes too.
Presently Dapper Cigars are made in Nicaragua. Ian started working with a small factory in Estelí, Nicaragua to begin with. Smaller factories were probably happy to get the extra work and probably had lower minimum orders than the bigger factories. The original project was the Cubo Claro which has a Connecticut wrapper, very popular in the USA. Cubo Claro started the ball rolling and word spread quickly expanding quickly from just his friends to finding their way into local cigar shops. Something I noticed when researching Dapper Cigars is that they use a lot of tobacco from the Oliva Tobacco Company. Oliva is one of the oldest tobacco growers in the New world and started back in 1969. From humble Cuban roots to the successors having one of the world’s best stock of tobacco, the Oliva name means quality tobacco.
We're very excited to welcome 3 cigars from Dapper to our line-up; the Cubo Sumatra Short Robusto, the La Madrina Robusto and the El Borracho Natural Edmundo, all available here: Dapper Cigars
