Editorial: On Five Years

I’m sitting at my computer—or at least I was when I wrote this—and I thought to myself, “it’s mid-to-late June, when did I start TheCigarFeed again?”

Turns out, it was June 20, 2010.

That’s when I turned on the lights at my first cigar blog, thecigarfeed.com.[ref]That domain just goes to halfwheel at this point, hence the lack of the link.[/ref]

While it’s not too difficult to find some explanation of how TheCigarFeed transitioned into halfwheel,[ref]Examples of that can be found here and here.[/ref] There’s not really a ton of explanation about how TheCigarFeed got started and it’s a question I get a lot in person. Much of the vision of halfwheel and some of what will be reiterated below can be found in a post entitled “Reflections on a Year”—something I deliberately decided to preserve at halfwheel, much as a reminder to myself of where it all came from.

I started writing about Apple products and accessories. It started in high school on forums and then found its way to blogs. It was fun, there are few things in the world quite like CES, but there was some excitement that was missing. It most certainly wasn’t a lack of products, but there definitely was a lack of connection. The tech industry is huge, tech media is probably close to the size of the entire premium cigar business, so it’s hard to connect.

In 2009, I headed off to Wake Forest University to begin my college career and while there, I began smoking cigars. There was coughing and feeling sick and all the other things that went along with smoking cigars for the first time, but there also was a lot of reading. Why does this cigar taste like this one? Why does this one look like this one, but taste completely different? I had questions and I wanted answers.

Some of the answers I found online, but some of them were more challenging. Eventually I realized the best way to solve that problem was by talking to a tobacconist and shortly thereafter I ordered some cigars from Tobacco Locker.

Without Bill Davies there would be no halfwheel. Without Bill Davies, TheCigarFeed doesn’t happen.

Bill and I began chatting as I was ordering cigars from him—looking for some Oliva Special S—and he appreciated a younger and sarcastic take on some of the common marketing in the cigar industry. He wanted me to write about cigars and said if I did, he throw a small ad up on the site.

On June 20, 2010, I made TheCigarFeed public. It was a site that was named after a website I once worked for called TheMacFeed.[ref]Also defunct.[/ref] I didn’t know what I was doing, but I did know that there were certain things that were missing from the online cigar world. Rich Perelman’s CigarCylopedia[ref]That’s defunct too.[/ref] would do a sort of weekly update on the cigar industry, but it was derived mostly from press releases and catalog retailer sales. It was highly informative, but missing all of the action going on at the then vibrant community of cigar manufacturers, reps, retailers and consumers on Twitter. So I started publishing the Weekly News.

That’s where I met Skip Martin.

If you are on Twitter and you smoke cigars, Skip is going to be unavoidable. At the time, Skip was really just another dude smoking cigars.[ref]That’s a reference to his Twitter bio, “Just another dude that smokes cigars.”[/ref] His physical shop had been devastated by Hurricane Ike  in 2008 and RoMa Craft Tobac was still a half year or so away from launching, but he had some sort of a blog for his rants that needed more than 140 characters, but his real home was Twitter. Skip and I did a few trades over the summer and got into a lot of arguments with lots of other people, because that’s what you do with Skip on social media.

That year’s trade show was in New Orleans, in August. We’ll return to New Orleans as industry in less than a month for the first time since 2010.

I met Skip in person for the first time and in about 30 minutes, he took me around and introduced me to about 40 manufacturers who were somewhere between one and 10 hurricanes at the Cigar Press party. It was as helpful as it was calming. I couldn’t remember the names of all these people and they were too drunk to remember it even happening, but it at least gave us common ground to pretend about remembering the event as we had a formal introduction on the last day of the show.

There were reviews and photographs. Bad photographs, many bad reviews. There were mistakes, mistakes far greater than the ones we make today. But each day I learned, each day I understood the business a bit better and each day I found that I could provide something people wanted to read.

Well, everyone except one person.

I’ve mentioned it before, but a week after I launched TheCigarFeed, David Hall of TheCigarNut, who at the time was towards the top of bloggers, published a scathing editorial attacking new cigar blogs. That article is no longer directly accessible, although a saved version is here, but there’s one line that will stick with me for the rest of my life, “but about 6-10 of the sites, your mom should have had the abortion.”

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I’m not sure David Hall necessarily deserves my gratitude, but I am thankful he published that. It was encouragement and has stuck with me to this day. There are a myriad of other people who helped me and eventually halfwheel get to where it is today. You reading this post is helpful. But as I reflect on four years and look back to 2010, look back at how I got here—that’s what I remember.

The next four weeks are the busiest time of the year for us and when our staff gathers at the end of day four for one last meal in New Orleans, I’ll be operating on a combination of adrenaline, nicotine and rum; because that’s how it’s been for the last four trade shows. That being said, I find this sort of recollection a good break from the hustle and bustle that is IPCPR preparations. And maybe next year, I can reflect on a different period of time, but today, it’s all but June 2010.

I wish I had a more eloquent way to say it, but—thank you Bill Davies; thank you Skip Martin; and thank you for that one thing, David Hall.