Matt Booth didn’t come to cigars the way most blenders do. He came from silver. From streetwear. From a jewelry brand built around alternative luxury, Japanese motifs, and an LA attitude that had no business landing in the premium cigar industry — and then did it anyway.
That’s the Room 101 story in miniature: something that shouldn’t work, working, then surviving every attempt the market makes to unmake it.
The Streetwear Designer Who Built a Cult Cigar Brand
Room 101 started in 2003 — not as a cigar company but as a lifestyle brand. Handmade sterling silver pieces with an edge. The kind of jewelry that read simultaneously as fine craftsmanship and something you’d find in a Tokyo streetwear shop. Booth, a former US Marine with a designer’s eye and a collector’s obsession, built a recognizable aesthetic long before he ever touched a leaf.
The cigars came in 2009. Booth partnered with Camacho Cigars — part of the Davidoff Group — and began manufacturing at their Honduras operation. The Camacho connection wasn’t incidental. It gave Room 101 access to world-class tobacco infrastructure, Honduran puro-level sourcing, and Davidoff’s distribution muscle. In return, Davidoff got something their portfolio didn’t have: an aesthetic-first brand that attracted a younger, more restless buyer.
For nearly eight years, it worked. Lines like Namakubi, Daruma, The Big Payback, and the strikingly named Chief Cool Arrow built a community of buyers who cared as much about the box art as the smoke. Room 101 developed a cult following that crossed over from cigar shops into the kind of places that sell $400 sneakers.
One thing the relationship wasn’t: a buyout. Booth always owned Room 101. Davidoff manufactured and distributed. That distinction matters — and it matters more in hindsight than it did at the time.
The 2017 Exit: Walking Away with the Keys
In January 2017, Matt Booth announced he was done. He didn’t renew his manufacturing contract with Davidoff, cited FDA over-regulation as a breaking point, and stepped back to focus on the jewelry business that started everything.
It looked like a quiet ending for a loud brand.
Booth kept something when he left: the name. Room 101 — as a cigar entity — belonged to him. Davidoff sold through remaining inventory, but the brand’s future was Booth’s call.
Six months later, he was back.
The return didn’t look like a triumphant comeback. It looked like someone who missed it. The “Hit & Run” collaboration with Robert Caldwell wasn’t a Room 101 release — it was Booth finding his way back through the side door, working with manufacturers he trusted on projects that had room to breathe. Later collaborations with AJ Fernandez followed. By the time he officially reactivated the Room 101 name, he’d already built a body of independent work that proved he didn’t need Davidoff’s infrastructure to make interesting cigars.
The post-Davidoff lines — Farce, Doomsayer — carried a different energy than the earlier catalog. Leaner production, blunter names, darker in every sense. If the Camacho years were about building a brand with the resources to do anything, the independent years were about figuring out what the brand actually was.
The STG Deal: Selling the Brand, Keeping the Vision
In June 2022, Room 101 changed hands again — this time definitively. Scandinavian Tobacco Group, one of the largest cigar conglomerates in the world, acquired the Room 101 brand from Booth.
This is where the story gets philosophically interesting.
Booth didn’t leave. He stayed on as creative director, with explicit responsibility over product development and design. Room 101 now lives inside STG’s Forged Cigar Company — the house that also distributes Ventura Cigar Co. and a portfolio of other craft-positioned brands. The distribution reach is enormous. The production options are broader than they’ve ever been.
The question the cigar community immediately asked was the obvious one: Can a cult brand survive going corporate?
It’s not a new question. The premium cigar industry has watched it play out enough times to have settled opinions. Macanudo went one direction. Camacho went another after Davidoff absorbed them. General Cigar has managed legacy brands with varying levels of respect for what they used to mean.
Room 101 is a different case because Booth is still in the room. He’s not a figurehead — the creative director title came with actual authority over what the cigars are and what they look like. And the brand’s identity was never really about the manufacturing; it was always about Booth’s aesthetic, the naming sense, the box design that made you want to display it before you smoked it.
Whether STG can hold that space — keep Room 101 feeling independent while scaling it for global distribution — is still being answered.
What Room 101 Tells Us About the Independent Market
The Room 101 trajectory maps something real about where premium cigars are heading.
The independent segment thrived in the 2010s. Brands built on individual vision, small-batch thinking, and community loyalty carved out space that the major manufacturers couldn’t replicate just by throwing money at it. Room 101 was one of the better examples: a genuinely distinctive aesthetic, a maker with a clear point of view, a customer base that felt like members of something.
But independence has real costs. FDA compliance infrastructure, distribution build-out, the overhead of staying relevant without a parent company’s marketing budget — these are serious operational problems. The 2017 exit wasn’t just about frustration; it reflected the practical weight of being a small operation in a regulated industry during one of its most uncertain regulatory periods.
What the STG deal represents isn’t a failure of independent spirit. It’s a recognition that at a certain scale, creative vision and commercial infrastructure need different partners. Booth got distribution reach he couldn’t have built alone. STG got a brand with genuine cultural currency in a segment they couldn’t have manufactured.
The brands that navigate this transition best are the ones where the founder doesn’t disappear. Where the deal is structured around protecting the thing that made the brand worth acquiring in the first place.
Room 101 is still the test case. The 17th Anniversary collaboration with AJ Fernandez — a full-bodied, post-acquisition release — received strong marks. The lineup has continued to expand with the distinctive naming sensibility intact. Whether that holds at scale, over years, inside a conglomerate, is the question nobody can answer yet.
The Long Read on Matt Booth
The most useful lens on Room 101 is probably not the corporate transactions but the person driving all of them.
Booth is a former Marine who became a fine jeweler who became a cigar blender who walked away from the industry under FDA pressure and came back six months later anyway. That’s not a person defined by his business structure. That’s a person defined by the thing he makes.
The aesthetic-first approach to cigar branding — the Japanese imagery, the aggressive line names, the collector-grade packaging — came directly out of his design background. He applied a streetwear lens to an industry that had operated on tradition and heritage for a century. It didn’t dilute the premium experience; it made it legible to a different kind of buyer.
That’s the real Room 101 contribution to premium cigars: proving that an aesthetic-first brand could command shelf respect equal to houses with 100-year histories, without faking history it didn’t have.
The question for the next chapter is whether that contribution survives the scale that comes with STG. Matt Booth thinks it does. The early evidence is encouraging. But Room 101 has always been defined by its ability to surprise the industry — and that’s harder to do from inside a conglomerate than from a workbench in Los Angeles.
Room 101 cigars are distributed by Forged Cigar Company, a division of Scandinavian Tobacco Group. Matt Booth remains creative director. The full lineup is available at premium retailers nationwide.