SzivarInfo brings a scattered enthusiast community into one premium, editorial home: a social feed, clubs and events, a digital humidor to track your collection, lounge check-ins and a curated catalogue. We designed the whole product, end to end.
Cigar culture is rich, but its digital life is fragmented: forums here, a Facebook group there, a spreadsheet for your humidor, and word of mouth for lounges and events. Nowhere felt premium enough to match the craft, and nothing joined the social side to the practical one.
SzivarInfo set out to be the single home: somewhere you check daily for the feed, and keep coming back to because it is genuinely useful. Your collection, your clubs, your check-ins, all in one place.
A community platform only wins if it’s worth opening both when you’re bored and when you need it.
What it had to join up
We owned the product end to end: framing the proposition, organising a broad feature set into one clear structure, and designing every surface in a premium, editorial visual language, all the way to a PWA that installs like a native app.
What we owned
The design challenge
A feed alone fades; a tool alone is a chore. The pairing is the product.
Options considered
A single-purpose humidor app, a content community, or both joined up.
The choice
A daily feed for return visits, backed by a digital humidor and catalogue with lasting value.
Trade-off accepted
A broader scope and IA to hold together, in exchange for real daily relevance.
The category defaults to green-and-gold kitsch that cheapens the craft.
Options considered
The traditional green and gold lounge look, or a restrained editorial system.
The choice
Obsidian, ivory and bronze with a refined serif display: a magazine feel that respects the subject.
Trade-off accepted
More art-direction effort, and discipline to keep “premium” from tipping into precious or unusable.
Collectors already track cigars, ageing and details, badly, in spreadsheets.
Options considered
Simple favourites, or a genuine inventory tool.
The choice
A proper humidor that tracks your collection with the detail enthusiasts actually keep.
Trade-off accepted
A richer data model and more considered UI, in exchange for a feature people rely on.
Social features need a crowd, and a new platform doesn’t have one yet.
Options considered
Lead with social (needs scale), or lead with solo value and add social on top.
The choice
Make the humidor, catalogue and knowledge base valuable on their own; add clubs, events and check-ins for the network effect.
Trade-off accepted
Social areas shine only as the community grows, but the product is never empty on day one.
SzivarInfo is a coherent, premium community product that is useful the day you join, and more social as the clubs, events and check-ins fill up. The evidence is the breadth held together under one system, and a visual language that finally does the category justice.
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