I'll tell ya what the deal with Tatuaje is....or at least what MY personal viewpoint on it is.
Everytime I walked into a b&m 4 or 5 years ago, what I'd find were a lot of Dominican and Honduran cigars that were blended with mass-market tastes in mind. Sure there were some quality Nicaraguan cigars out there (Padron for example) and some nice stuff coming from Fuente (Opus for example), but the majority of sticks at the time were dominated by a lot of well blended but not particularly exciting or dynamic tasting cigars. I would walk through a shop and know that 95% of the stock would disappoint my tastebuds.
Tatuaje led the charge in bringing small production boutique cigars to the market, dynamically blended cigars that were EXCITING to my tastebuds....much like CCs, although obviously with a different flavor profile, but similar in the thought process in the way that they were blended. It's noticeable in just about everything that Don Pepin manufacturers, but it's particularly evident in the cigars Pete had Pepin make for him. Obviously Pepin is a huge part of what Tatuaje does, but Pete's own personal taste (I believe) push what Pepin creates to the maximum, falling right in line with what cigar enthusiasts wanted and happened to be exactly what the market was lacking at the time.
Basically, I think that unlike most of the big companies in the cigar industry, Pete was just a regular cigar nut like us who was really in tune with what cigar nuts wanted. He wasn't trying to make cigars for the masses to be sold in multi-million quantities, he was trying to make stuff for people like us--and like him.
On top of that, by Pete joining in and chatting (and sometimes fighting) on forums like this one, Tatuaje as a company had a lot of "transparency", meaning we could see for ourselves what the brand was all about. The hardcore cigar guys could TELL that Pete was "one of us" and wanted the same things out of cigars that we did. I don't think anyone else out there was really doing that at the time.
Then you gotta factor in the packaging, appearance, and marketing of the product. Most cigars on the b&m shelves were cello wrapped and packed in display boxes...but the hardcore cigar nuts were buying CCs in cabs and dress boxes, and never in cello. I mean come on, the packaging was JUST LIKE the CCs we were buying. Slide lid cab boxes, tied in a yellow ribbon like a wheel, no cello, with a sealed Tax label and a box code. A box code on NCs! It was genius packaging and marketing, and it caught a lot of us hook-line-sinker.
Lotsa cigar companies--even the big guys--are doing that sort of stuff NOW, but at the time it was revolutionary. He basically catered to the desires of the hardcore cigar enthusiast in a way (flavor, packaging, marketing, transparency) that no one else was doing at the time.
Big ups to Pete Johnson for turning the U.S. cigar market on it's ear. I for one am glad that somebody did it. He got me--and a lot of other folks, obviously--buying NC cigars again.
