Meet the Man Running 45 Cigar Shops Across Asia

Pacific Cigar Company is the largest premium cigar retailer in Asia, with 45 stores across nine countries, and the man who has run it for over twenty years is Dag Holmboe. We sat down with him at La Casa del Habano on the Causeway Bay in Hong Kong.

Most of the global cigar trade has moved online. In the UK, the US and Switzerland, the majority of premium cigar sales now happen on websites. PCC has gone the other way. The company does not sell online at all outside of a small delivery service in Australia. If you want a cigar from PCC, you walk into a store and talk to whoever is behind the counter, and the whole business is built around that interaction.

That model has produced a network that keeps growing. Hong Kong alone has seventeen stores, ranging from small heritage rooms inside hotels like the Mandarin Oriental to large flagship lounges with terraces overlooking the harbour. The wider network covers Macao, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia, and PCC is currently building a new flagship in Macao and another large location in Hong Kong, with further expansion planned across Australia, Thailand and Taiwan.

In the interview, Dag explains why PCC has stayed with the in person model when the rest of the industry has not, what it takes to run cigar lounges in nine countries with nine different sets of tobacco laws, and where the company is opening next. The full interview is below.