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Hey Honey, I’m Brianna Chiuchiolo, founder and owner of HoneyBee Cigars.
HoneyBee has changed a lot since I first started telling this story. So have I.
But to understand what HoneyBee has become, you have to understand where it started.
Cigars have been part of my world for most of my life. I grew up around my father’s cigar business, surrounded by humidors, tobacco, cigar rollers, customers, stories and all the personalities that somehow find their way into a cigar shop.
Without realizing it at the time, I was absorbing a legacy in this business simply by being around it.
I watched. I listened. I learned.
I learned about cigars, but I also learned about people.
I watched relationships turn into customers, customers turn into regulars and regulars become people you genuinely knew. I watched my father carve out his own little corner of this industry and build a living by doing things his way.
That stayed with me.
But HoneyBee was never about recreating what came before me.
I wanted something of my own.
Probably because I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling like one.
My road to HoneyBee wasn’t some perfectly planned entrepreneurial journey.
I tried different careers. I worked in healthcare, sales and management. I chased stability. I worked hard. I succeeded at things that still didn’t quite feel like mine.
I’ve always been creative, stubborn, entrepreneurial and a little unconventional. My brain has never been particularly interested in staying inside one box.
For a long time, I didn’t know where to put all of that. Eventually, I found my answer.
I built a HIVE.
When I entered the cigar industry on my own terms, there were people who didn’t understand what I was doing. I was underestimated. I was told I’d drown. So I learned how to FLY. There were doors that weren’t necessarily opening for me. So I stopped knocking and started building my own.
That philosophy became part of HoneyBee from the very beginning:
We don’t wait for doors to open. We build them ourselves.
And years later, I still believe every damn word of it.
I began with cigars I believed in. I selected them, gave them names, personalities and stories, photographed them and started building a world around them. Those stories became deeply personal.
Some of the people I love are permanently woven into this company.
My grandmother Lucille was a strong, funny, stubborn woman and entrepreneur who owned a liquor store in a completely different generation. Her spirit lives inside Queen Lucilla, a cigar created in her honor.
Other pieces of my family, my life, memories and people who have meant something to me have found their way into HoneyBee too.
That’s when I realized something:
A cigar can carry a story.
You can light it. You can share it. You can create a memory around it.
And long after the smoke disappears, the story can remain.
That became one of my favorite things about creating HoneyBee.
I kept finding things. Different cigars. Different sizes. Beautiful wrappers. Complex wrappers. Naked cigars. Great deals. Interesting opportunities. New people. New stories. New ways of getting premium tobacco into somebody’s hands.
And every time I’d find something I loved, my brain would immediately start going:
Ohhhh… what can I do with THIS?
At first, I wondered whether HoneyBee was becoming too many things.
Then one day it clicked.
I’m a bee. I’m supposed to be all over the damn place.
Bees don’t sit still. They explore. They find what’s good. They move between different places.
They pollinate. They build. They Fly. They Create.
And they all bring something back to the HIVE.
That’s exactly what HoneyBee started doing.
Honestly?
A little bit of everything—and very intentionally so.
HoneyBee is still an independent, woman-led premium cigar brand.
But that’s no longer the entire story.
Sometimes I find a cigar that deserves a HoneyBee branded band, a name and an entire world built around it.
Sometimes I find something beautiful and decide to play with it—different wrappers, shapes, sizes and Design Cigars that let me be creative.
Sometimes a cigar is so damn good exactly as it is that I leave it completely naked.
That’s where Factory Access became part of the HIVE.
Premium and super-premium cigars/bundles, rotating finds and opportunities that don’t necessarily need fancy packaging or another elaborate story attached to them.
Sometimes a damn good cigar can just be a damn good cigar.
I’ve also found myself working in ways I never originally planned. Helping shops and lounges access premium bundles. Even the everyday smoker too!
Creating memberships. Building limited releases. Working with people on personal cigar projects. Access for the people.
Taking someone’s memory, family member or idea and helping turn it into something other people can actually smoke.
Collaborating with people who genuinely bring something special to the Hive.
I wear a lot of hats.
I’m not trying to fix that anymore.
That’s how I operate.
I don’t own a tobacco farm.
I don’t own a cigar factory.
I don’t personally roll every cigar you see on this website.
And I’m not interested in manufacturing some elaborate story just to make something sound more important than it is.
What I do have is something I’ve spent years developing:
access, instinct, creativity, relationships and customers I’ve learned how to listen to.
I know what catches my eye.
I know what makes me curious.
I know what my HIVE smokes.
And when I find something I believe deserves a place here, I figure out what HoneyBee can do with it.
Sometimes that means dressing it all the way up.
Sometimes that means leaving it naked.
The cigar gets to tell me what it wants to be.
And I think that’s pretty fucking cool.
Those words started as part of the personality of HoneyBee.
Over time, I’ve realized they’re really the personality of the woman behind it.
I’m sweet. I’m sentimental. I’m playful. I’m feminine. I’m creative.
I’m a little wild.
I love people. I love making people laugh. I love giving somebody an opportunity or introducing someone to a cigar they never would’ve chosen themselves and watching it become their favorite.
Honey is love at the end of the day. I believe in supporting people, and I always will.
I’ve sent cigars. I’ve opened doors. I’ve supported creators. I’ve worked with shops. I’ll collaborate. I’ve welcomed beginners. I’ve created space for stories that otherwise might never have been told.
That part of me hasn’t changed. But running a business teaches you things.
I’ve learned that being kind doesn’t mean giving everyone unlimited access to what you’ve built.
Community doesn’t mean sacrificing your business. Collaboration doesn’t mean everybody gets your time, creativity, customers or name.
And supporting the cigar industry doesn’t mean HoneyBee has to become its community center.
The HIVE is welcoming. But I protect it. That’s the sting.
This might be the biggest way I’ve changed since starting HoneyBee.
There was a time when I probably cared much more about whether the cigar industry understood what I was doing.
Today, I respect this industry tremendously. I love cigars.
I love many of the people I’ve met because of them.
But one doesnt need to attend every cigar event, be on every podcast, etc.
I don’t need every cigar sitting inside a beautiful wooden box.
And I don’t need HoneyBee to operate exactly like the cigar company next to it in order for what I’m building to be legitimate.
I’m not trying to become the cigar industry.
I’m trying to build my own version of it.
A place where customers come back because they trust what they’re going to find.
A place where shops and lounges know they can reach out.
A place where somebody’s story can unexpectedly become a cigar.
A place where I can wake up with some ridiculous idea and actually have the freedom to chase it.
A place where tradition is respected but never allowed to kill creativity.
Success hasn’t made me stop rooting for the person nobody sees coming.
Quite the opposite. I still root for the dreamer.
The person working a regular job while quietly building something on the side.
The entrepreneur whose family doesn’t completely understand what the hell they’re doing yet.
The woman walking into a room where nobody expected her.
The person starting with very little besides an idea and enough stubbornness to keep going.
The one who has been told no.
The one who hasn’t found their people yet.
The one building quietly while everybody else is busy looking somewhere else.
That’s my kind of person.
Because HoneyBee was never created from some giant position of power.
It was built piece by piece.
Order by order.
Idea by idea.
Customer by customer.
Mistake by mistake.
And little by little, the HIVE started growing.
I don’t ever want to become so polished that I forget that.
HoneyBee is independent, but I didn’t become who I am in a vacuum.
I come from a strong Italian family and generations of people with backbone.
My father taught me more about the cigar business simply by letting me exist around it than I probably understood at the time.
The entrepreneurial women in my family showed me what a strong business looked like long before I ever became one myself.
I’ve taken pieces of all of that with me. But I’ve built my own version. That’s what legacy means to me. Not copying what came before you.
Taking what it gave you and having enough courage to create something new with it.
Bees are small but mighty. They work. They explore. They pollinate.
They uplift and help the world around them grow.
They build incredibly complex things one tiny piece at a time.
They create something sweet and when necessary… they sting.
I couldn’t have picked a better symbol for the company I would eventually grow into—even before I fully understood why.
HoneyBee represents sweetness with strength. Femininity with backbone.
Community without losing individuality. Tradition without being trapped by it.
Ambition without forgetting where you came from and the belief that being underestimated can sometimes be the greatest position in the world.
Because nobody sees the the tiny bee coming. They see the SWARM.
I’m building independence. A HIVE FAMILY.
Something that allows me to create. Something that tells stories.
Building a Hive where all are welcome, the new beginners to the seasoned aficionados
Something that hopefully reminds another underdog somewhere that there isn’t always going to be a perfectly marked path waiting for you.
Sometimes you’ve got to wander around a little. Sometimes you’ve got to get stung. Each can be looked at in different perspectives!
KEEP FLYING, and touch that sky!
I’m still learning, creating, building. Still rooting for the underdog. Still challenging the norm.
Sharing the honey with the HIVE.
Smoking to Sweet Success, Honey is LOVE.
Welcome to HoneyBee.
-Bri Chiuchiolo,
Owner of HoneyBee Cigars
Cigar Sommelier Tobacconist, Creative Director, Music Artist, Founder of Boutique Cigar Society
EST 2024
OUT OF RESPECT FOR OUR FAMILY’S LONG-STANDING CIGAR TRADITIONS AND TO PROTECT THE INTEGRITY OF OUR BRAND, THE EXACT ORIGINS OF OUR BLENDS AND THE LOCATIONS OF OUR PARTNER FACTORIES AND FARMS REMAIN PRIVATE. OUR CIGARS ARE DEVELOPED IN COLLABORATION WITH TRUSTED ARTISANS IN TAMPA AND NICARAGUA, CRAFTED IN SMALL BATCHES USING PREMIUM LONG-FILLER TOBACCO AND TIME-HONORED TECHNIQUES. EACH LEAF IS CAREFULLY CURED, AGED, AND FINISHED UNDER THE EYE OF OUR MASTER PARTNERS, RESULTING IN RICH, COMPLEX FLAVORS AND FLAWLESS WRAPPERS. WE DON’T CUT CORNERS, AND WE DON’T HAND OUT OUR SECRETS. BY PROTECTING OUR PROCESS AND PRIORITIZING QUALITY, WE DELIVER A SMOKING EXPERIENCE THAT HITS HARDER, LASTS LONGER, AND CAN’T BE REPLICATED. CRAFTED FOR THOSE WHO DEMAND THE RARE AND THE REFINED.