Late last year, I was in a cigar store with an employee of another cigar company and we walked over to the Meerapfel Cigar Richard Double Robusto sitting on a table in the humidor. He laughed, seemingly at the ridiculousness of the package. My point to him was the following: look around the humidor, is there anything else here that looks like this?
You’d have to be in a very special store to find another cigar sold in a presentation that is of this quality level. Yes, the design is very aesthetically-pleasing, but the Meerapfel Cigar Richard Double Robusto tops the 2022 Packaging Awards because of quality.
There are two aspects that stand out more than the rest. First, the whole presentation is very large. Because the cigars sit in an ashtray that uses the basic layout of ubiquitous porcelain ashtrays used by other companies, it’s not immediately apparent just how large it is. But as you can see, this is a super-sized version of said ashtray, one that can hold 10 cigars measuring 5 3/4 x 52 neatly placed inside of the bottom partof the ashtray.
Second, there’s no part of the packaging that seems like it wasn’t the most expensive option.
That ashtray comes inside of a wooden box—the company calls them “chests”—that are made out of much nicer wood than a standard wooden cigar box. The bands have dozens of internal pieces that have been cut out to show more of the vintage Cameroon wrapper. The Meerapfels have spent an inordinate amount of time discussing the ribbon used to hold the cigars in place, which has “MEERAPFEL” placed on it with individual letters that have been placed on top rather than printed on. I suppose if you are going to talk about ribbon manufacturing, this would be the occasion. Given our attempt at word limits, I’ve run out of characters to talk about all the other details: QR codes, printed material, the way the cigars are cradled in the ashtray, etc. Even the included Boveda pack comes perfectly aligned in the center of the package.
If you are going to pay $860 for a box of 10 cigars, you are going to at least walk out of the store holding a box that looks and feels decidedly different than everything else in the humidor. — Charlie Minato.
