Skull 77 cigars

These cigars were brought to life by the Swiss Laurent Taha. The story behind them is, once again, quite entertaining, so we’ll take a slightly closer look here. As a good friend of Marc Niehaus, the founder and owner of Vegas de Santiago Zigarren, he helped out at his booth at Inter Tabac in Dortmund in September 2013. During this activity, which was not particularly demanding for him, he let his gaze wander over the attendees and spotted two tattooed bikers. It struck him that, apart from different names and formats, the cigar business had not really evolved over the past decades in terms of graphics, design, and marketing.

Skull 77 Zigarren: Laurent Taha’s Vision of a Modern Cigar Brand

This marked the starting point of a shared adventure with his friend Marc Niehaus. For the launch date on 7/7/2014 (!), they chose as their first format a somewhat thicker and short Robusto called El Unico. Since then, two additional formats have been added. Particular care was taken with the cigar band, or rather, the story behind it is also quite detailed. On the one hand, the number 77 represents his year of birth; on the other, the red eye of the skull is meant to recall the Hollywood film Terminator starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. That the skull has a cigar in its mouth is self-explanatory and a nice additional detail.

From Biker Encounters to Premium Cigars: The Creation of Skull 77

The first run, i.e. the first “batch,” consisted of 1,500 cigars. A few months later, in 2015, El Niño followed as an alternative for the so-called short smoke, when there is no longer enough time for a “proper” cigar. Finally, in 2018, the Piramide El Volcano was launched. All Skull 77 cigars are rolled at the Tabacalera Vegas de Santiago by Marc Niehaus. The filler tobaccos come from Peru, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. The wrapper and the binder are H-2000 from Ecuador.