There are a lot of aspects to smoking cigars and one of them is the band that encircles cigars. I don’t know about you but I know a lot of cigar smokers that do not really pay that much attention to the cigar bands. In fact, some cigar smokers just immediately remove the band and then throw it away before smoking. On the other hand, other smokers make it a point to leave them on.
So are cigar bands really important? Where did they originate from anyway? According to Garson Smart in his article, “Gustave Bock, a Dutch immigrant who owned a cigar factory in Cuba in the 1830s, is credited with being the first to place a paper band around his cigars. (Bock’s “cigar band” was just a paper ring with his signature on it.)â€
This was supposed to originate from the fact that fake Cubans proliferated in the early 19th century. This was because the cigars back then were generally left unmarked. The manufacturers back then didn’t really pay much attention to the packaging and there were no proprietary marks on the cigars themselves.
After Gustave Bock started his cigar band practice, other cigar makers in Cuba started to follow suit. By the time half of the 19th century was gone, majority of the Cuban cigar makers were using cigar bands. More than preventing fakes, the practice of using cigar bands also helped create brand consciousness.