Stories Of The Cigar Companies: Camacho

Famous literary critic Harold Bloom (as seen on TV, elderly, wild-haired and wild-eyed, pounding some talk show's table on behalf of the Great Books) likes to argue that all of literary history comes down to competition and struggle. Each poet (or novelist, or essayist) must fight against some privileged, influential ancestor, trying to emerge from the earlier writer's giant shadow. The greatest writers are the ones who win.

Whether this theory really explains art or not, it does sound like a likely enough explanation for the pre-eminent place held by Camacho as one of the great premium cigar makers in the world. This is a company whose own leaders--father-and-son team Julio and Christian Eiroa--bet with each other about which Camacho product would be most successful. (And according to press reports, it was a serious bet too: Julio was rooting for the lighter-bodied Camacho Select, a cigar on which he refused his son's input, while Christian was pulling for the now-successful Camacho Corojo. Dad likes light-bodied smokes; his son likes the opposite.) The two have even occasionally been known to trade barbs in front of visiting interviewers. Camacho, it seems, is a company that thrives on struggle.

But there's a happy side to all this. When your competition comes from within the company, there's no time for complacency to develop. And, at the same time, there's no limit to how good you can become, because you're always challenging yourself. When that competitive spirit links itself to the pursuit of excellence, the result can be great for smokers. Julio's seriousness about good cigars once led him (by his own account) to commit two million dollars' worth of tobacco to the flames because the leaves didn't meet his exacting standards.

And all this competitive struggle between generations seems, in recent years, to be leading to a successful company whose products consistently garner high recommendations from cigar-industry trade magazines. Though Camacho has been making cigars for decades (it was founded by Simon Camacho in 1961), it has seen such profits in recent years as to be acquired by Davidoff in 2008. That profitability has a lot to do with the sudden turnaround in the cigar industry's fortunes during the early 1990s, but even more to do some observers say, with the company's earlier takeover by Caribe Imported Cigars in 1994.

Caribe's acquisition of Camacho was the point at which the Eiroas entered the picture--the Camacho was only one of several cigar brands they sold, but the kinds of cigars made by Simon Camacho ended up being the most popular coming from Caribe's stable. So, like other businesses that rename themselves after their flagship products--think, for example, of National Periodicals restyling itself, after the success of flagship title Detective Comics and a certain cowled caped crusader introduced in its pages, with the more familiar DC Comics--Caribe Imported Cigars became simply Camacho.

Now that Caribe has become Camacho and gotten acquired in its turn, the Swiss cigar giant Davidoff claims (according to various news reports) that it has no intention of changing the way Camacho does business, and that Christian Eiroa will remain in charge of the company's operations. Eiroa was behind the successful Corojo launch, the redesign of much of the company's packaging, and other bold new initiatives of the past several years.

The most recent of those initiatives is the interactive, cigar-smokers' social-networking website SocialCigar, which Camacho launched in early 2008. This new venture follows the company's early embrace of MySpace and Facebook, technologies that allow companies new marketing opportunities--but which also intimidate many older businesses. Not Camacho. Now they've created a Facebook-like interactive world of their own, geared exclusively toward cigar smokers. In typical Camacho spirit, the site's front page exhorts visitors to "join the cigar revolution!" No half-measures for these folks.

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