Views from a Smoke-Filled Room

LOS ANGELES – Lighting a cigar is getting harder and harder.

That’s not because of any anti-smoking legislation, but because there’s more to light. Among premium cigar smokers, the preferred ring gauge has outstripped any study on obesity.

For generations, the overwhelming favorite among cigar shapes was the corona, classically defined by the Cuban cigar trade as 5 1/2 inches long by 42 ring gauge (or 42/64ths of an inch in diameter). A Lonsdale, at 6 1/2 inches and 42 ring was considered a large cigar. Today, that’s nothing.

Today’s premiere shape is the robusto, classically five inches long but with a ring gauge of 50, an increase of 19% in the thickness of the cigar. But the push toward even larger cigars has been relentless, to the point where many makers include cigars of 60 ring gauge, or 43% larger than yesterday’s corona in their lines!

Lighting these monsters requires a change in technology; a paper match or even short wooden matches are not often up to the task. Enter Zippo.

The famous lighter company, founded in 1932, is justly proud of its fluid-filled lighters used primarily for cigarettes. But for cigars, the preferred fuel is butane gas, which is tasteless and odorless. Other than a short dalliance in the 1980s with an imported butane lighter called the Contempo, Zippo hasn’t had much interest in the butane – or cigar – markets. Until now.

Zippo has successfully expanded into refillable butane lighters with its wildly popular Multi-Purpose Lighter, which is primarily used for candles and barbeques. That device offers a conventional flame, but Zippo decided to take a new look at the expanding cigar market and decided to offer a lighter specially made for cigar smokers.

The result is the ZippoBLU, a completely new take on the favored lighter of the cigar set, the torch. Zippo engineered a new approach to the torch, incorporating its iconic flint-wheel sparking mechanism to operate the lighter, which produces a clean, single-torch flame nicely suitable for lighting even the fattest cigars.

The ZippoBLU is lightly longer than the standard Zippo lighter and comes in a variety of designs. If successful, it could be the start of a line of Zippo cigar accessories as the company has identified the growth potential in that area.

The pricing of the ZippoBLU line offers the reason: you’ll sell a lot fewer lighters to the cigar crowd that you will to cigarette smokers, but the pricing can be higher. Most standard Zippos retail for $15 to $30 with a few of the special designs higher. But the 12-style ZippoBLU line starts with retail prices for the Dusted Chrome model at $48 and works up to about $70 for the Golden Hologram design.

That’s considerably more than other torch lighters cost, but they aren’t a Zippo and don’t have Zippo’s lifetime "It works or we fix it for free" warranty. That’s why the Zippo folks don’t think their new BLU line will turn into anything except green.

After all, it’s a Zippo.

(Rich Perelman is editor-in-chief of CigarCyclopedia.com, offering comprehensive daily coverage of cigars, accessories, issues, people and prices at www.CigarCyclopedia.com.

Rich Perelman

12/3/07

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