How to buy a cigar for £10,000: The story of CaLaDa
I am in my 60s and all of my vices have, over the past few years, gradually given me up; eating poorly, drinking and smoking, to name a few, however, I still wanted something to put a full stop on the end of my day.
A year ago I was given a cigar by an old friend and I loved it. It was there I decided, this would be my new full stop.
I was very new to cigars however fortunately, because I live in London, I have access to lots of cigar stores. As someone who knew less than nothing about cigars, apart from which end to light and which end to cut off, I was desperate to know what cigars to smoke, but I didn’t even know the correct questions to ask when I went to a shop. I was told mild cigars were for beginners and fuller bodied cigars were for more experienced smokers, however now I know different.
Although the cigar shops in London were fabulous looking, had been trading for centuries, and had very nice people working in them, their staff were unable to assist me because, much like everything else in the world, taste in cigars is subjective.
So what to do? Find one I like and stick to it? What if there was another out there that was better? What if I didn’t want to smoke just one brand, like we all do with cigarettes, but perhaps I wanted to smoke a variety of them, like I used to do when drinking whiskey.
So I went online to gain more knowledge, but it appeared to me that all of the websites were pretty useless in terms of explaining what each cigar was like. They seemed to stock the products that their customers already knew and wanted to buy. Of course if you know what your customer wants then that’s commercially sensible to stock them. However, if you don’t know what you like, these sites are pretty useless at helping you find out. Without an opinion on cigars I was lost at sea without a paddle, or indeed, a boat.
Without really meaning to, I went on a mad spending spree and bought 94 individual cigars to gain a basic understanding. My wife was not best pleased, but after 30 years together, it is what it is. These cigars, I chose by virtue of many criteria. Firstly I went for all of the Cuban classics; Cohiba, Montecristo, Partagás, H. Upmann, La Gloria Cubana, Hoyo de Monterrey, Punch, and Romeo y Julieta. Secondly, I looked at New World cigars, but not knowing any names, it was a shot in the dark. I chose them based on what stood out, the long Joya De Nicaragua Numero Uno, the rectangular Joya De Nicaragua Cuatro Cinco. A small Perdomo Connecticut that would be a 10 minute smoke and the slightly larger, Alec Bradley Black Market Punk. I also chose based on their flavours, some that were described as mild and some described as spicy. All in all, I ended up with 94 cigars from 32 separate UK cigar websites.
The discovery I made along the way was that the websites I had bought from were borderline unusable for the hopeful cigar aficionado, it often felt like they were simply afterthoughts, adjuncts added to the big brick and mortar shops. The websites were simply added by retailers who thought they should have one. However, they were all clunky in their actions, slow to navigate from page to page and all had the same photos taken from the manufacturers portfolio of images. There was very little information or assistance. One couldn’t even tell how big a cigar was in comparison to another. Yes most had length and ring size available in their specification details but these were often left incomplete or, sometimes, entirely blank.
So, I got my 94 cigars delivered to me. Some arrived quickly, some very late. Some were packed in a reasonable fashion but many were not. It was pretty obvious that their website sales were not important to them.
This was in the summer of 2024 and my youngest child had just finished at university with a degree in business. His mother, my wife, suggested that whilst he waited to get a job offer, he should get a job at Starbucks or something similar, or at least just get out of her way. He wasn’t exactly excited at that prospect but he had little choice, apart from where to work.
Whilst he was contemplating this, the cigars were arriving and, given the warm balmy evenings of summer, we smoked the cigars together and discussed what we thought of each one. It was a lovely bonding time with my grown up son. Of course, given his degree in business marketing, we discussed these sites and he agreed they were not up to scratch for the modern digital world.
This led to weeks of furrowed browness and discussion. I adore a conundrum; I have, over more than 40 years in entrepreneurial startups, started up many businesses and, out of many failed ventures, have had three successful ones. So I have a confidence and a desire to want to do what others do, but do it better. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, simply just add a few more spokes. Better may be a higher quality, a cheaper price, a smoother experience; there are many ways to do ‘better’. It seemed to us that there is space to improve cigar websites.
Through natural osmosis, my son also has an entrepreneurial streak and so a new thought quickly arrived. Instead of working in Costa Coffee in between sending out his CV, he could build a cigar website. Perhaps one that was not just for old overweight men like me but also for a new younger generation like him.
The great news these days is that you don’t need to spend £100,000 on a website. Great websites can be built with some time and effort online for next to nothing.
There wasn’t a downside. If we bought cigars we liked and we failed to sell any, I could smoke them. Good quality cigars, if kept in the correct level of humidity, will keep, and indeed grow in value, so this was a very reasonable low level of risk. He could do this rather than work in a coffee shop and that would keep his mum happy too; a win-win-win!
The only other issue would be finding a supplier. During the smoking of the 94 cigars, we discovered that many of the famous Cuban brands were not that great. A lot were too tight to smoke and fell apart, as they were badly rolled. We got the feeling they had survived on their reputations alone as we had tried many cigars from Nicuragua, Honduras and the Dominican Republic and they had all been very good. They were also a lot less money.
The other issue in the UK is that there is only ONE wholesaler of Cuban cigars. An understandable monopoly has been built since the 1700’s by one importer who has cleverly, over more than 200 years, swallowed up all of their competitors. If you want Cuban cigars in the UK you must buy from this one company. This felt uncomfortable to us.
New World cigars, on the other hand, have various importers who were all really helpful.
So, it was an easy decision to only stock NEW WORLD.
We went through the same process of getting cigars from the wholesaler that we chose to work with to asses what we wanted to stock. 100+ cigars later, we had a list.
So, we set up this website, we stock just 32 cigars that we have personally smoked, liked and recommend.
The name we chose was CaLaDa, which means puff in Spanish. The logo is a tobacco flower. The website, we hope you agree, works well, has a younger feel to it and has more information than anyone else. These were decisions my son made before he did indeed get a job doing what he wanted to do, which means he now has no time and I am left to write blogs and arrange deliveries.
We now have a huge glass fronted humidor in our office full of boxes of cigars. Yes, please buy some but remember, if you don’t I will have to smoke them all. So don’t feel pressured or pushed, I’m having a lovely time.