PCA 2023: Top Three Things — Brooks Whittington

It has been a little more than seven days since I left Las Vegas, and while the halfwheel team’s work is far from done, that time away from the show has given me a chance to reflect a bit on some of the different items I saw while walking the floor over four days.

As we have done the past few years, this is my short list of some of the more interesting, surprising or just plain cool products that I saw while I was visiting booths. It should be noted that since the four writers have their own booths to cover, we do not come close to visiting every booth on the floor, so there are always things that each of us never gets to see.

You may notice that are no cigars on this list, and there is a good reason for that. I don’t usually get to smoke that many cigars during the six-day stretch that I am in Vegas, simply due to the fact that I am always either running around frantically, writing frantically, eating frantically or just dead asleep. I did somewhat better this year—I think I managed to smoke the majority of four different cigars—but I have learned over the years covering different conventions and trade shows that any moment I get to actually enjoy a cigar is fleeting at best.

1. Guillotina de Saka

Ever since Steve Saka, founder of Dunbarton Tobacco & Trust, teased this cutter earlier this year, I have wanted to actually see it in person. This is not the first cutter that Saka has tinkered with—you can see a very different version that he was showing off at the IPCPR show in 2019 here—but this one that was developed with Luigi Lucente, product development engineer at CigarMedics Inc.

As I mentioned in my Dunbarton booth post last week, the Guillotina de Saka has a number of unique features, starting with the fact that the 420 stainless steel blade—which Saka told me is made by a company that produces vegetable slicers—is designed to be easily replaceable by consumers without having to use any special tools. In addition, the cutter has a different-sized opening on each side of the case: one side is designed to cut cigars up to 48 ring gauge while the other is designed for cigars of 50 ring gauge or thicker.

Saka has repeatedly said that there are no current plans to sell the cutter on a commercial basis, as he is trying to work out whatever kinks in the design that may come up. To that end, some cutters from the initial production are being used as contest prizes and as “thank you” gifts to select Dunbarton accounts, while others are being given to various people in order to get feedback on how it performs with extended use.

2. El Reloj Lego Set

Perhaps it is just because my son has been obsessed with Legos since he was two-years-old, but when I heard about this project, I was instantly smitten. The 201-piece Lego set is a model of J.C. Newman’s El Reloj factory in Tampa, and after seeing it in person, I have to admit that it is a fairly accurate depiction, albeit on a much, much smaller scale.

J.C. Newman will be selling this set for $100 at its gift shop in Tampa as well as its online store, and I am already looking forward to having my son put it together so I can display it in my office. Hopefully, he has better luck than Charlie did.

3. Don Doroteo Salt of the Earth Display

In the 13 years I have been attending and covering the IPCPR/PCA Convention, the vast majority of companies have used fairly standard displays to show off their products, usually in the form of open tables, glass displays or some sort of shelves. Of course, there have been outliers: Plasencia’s “Fire Display” for the debut of its Alma del Fuego line in 2019 immediately springs to mind—but when you consider the sheer number of booths that have exhibited at the various shows over the years, unconventional examples have been few and far between.

That was definitely not the case for Don Doroteo at this year’s PCA Convention & Trade Show: while the company had a fairly a standard booth last year—including boxes of cigars on shelves—this year was very, very different. The highlight was a free-standing display inside of the booth that was filled with both real dirt and live plants, which had to be watered every once in a while. Laying on top of the dirt were two boxes of the company’s new show releases, a core line named Salt of the Earth.

From a purely visual perspective, the display was extremely well-designed: the white interior of the cigar boxes contrasted nicely with the dark brown color of the earth, and the small bulbs strung along the perimeter of the display were a nice touch. It is always great to see a company thinking outside of the box when it comes to displaying its creations, and Don Doroteo knocked it out of the park this year.