About Us

About the Speaker That Wouldn’t Leave Me Alone

This speaker started as a quiet irritation.

Not with the market. Not with customers.
With objects.

Every Bluetooth speaker I touched felt wrong in the same way—too light, too plastic, too eager to impress. They shouted features. They begged for attention. They looked like technology trying to cosplay as design.

I wanted something calmer. Something heavier. Something that didn’t announce itself the moment you walked into a room. Something that felt more like a cigar than a gadget—intentional, tactile, and unapologetically analog in spirit, even if it ran on modern tech.

So I built it. Or at least… I started trying to.

A Timeline Fueled by Curiosity and Mild Obsession

The first versions were bad. Not “quirky bad.” Just bad.

Wrong proportions. Wrong materials. Wrong feel.
Some sounded fine but looked awkward. Others looked great and sounded flat. A few were genuinely embarrassing, which is a rite of passage if you’re doing real design work instead of mood-boarding.

What followed was months of iteration:

  • reshaping the body

  • rethinking the internal layout

  • adjusting weight and balance

  • changing button placement and resistance

  • testing finishes that looked incredible until real life got involved

Every change came from using it. Living with it. Letting it annoy me. Then fixing what annoyed me.

This wasn’t a straight line. It was a loop. Build. Test. Hate something. Tear it apart. Do it again.

At some point, it stopped feeling like a prototype and started feeling like an object—something with presence. That’s when I knew I was getting close.

Design Is the Work You Don’t See

Most people will never notice the hardest decisions.

They won’t know how long it took to settle on proportions that felt right from every angle.
They won’t know how many internal configurations were tested just to get the sound to feel warm instead of aggressive.
They won’t know how many times I rejected “good enough” because it didn’t feel honest.

That’s fine.

The goal was never for this speaker to explain itself.
The goal was for it to feel inevitable—like it had always existed and just happened to land in your space.

Design, at its best, disappears. What remains is calm.

Why These Are Made One at a Time

There’s a reason this isn’t mass-produced.

When something is made in volume, decisions change. Tolerances widen. Corners get negotiated. You stop asking, “Is this right?” and start asking, “Is this acceptable?”

I didn’t want acceptable.

Each speaker is assembled by hand, finished by hand, tested by hand. That pace forces attention. It forces restraint. It also means small imperfections can exist—but they exist because a human made a call, not because a factory optimized one away.

This isn’t a lifestyle brand pretending to be personal.
It’s personal because it literally can’t be made any other way.

What CigarTone Is (and Very Intentionally Is Not)

This speaker isn’t trying to compete with your phone.
It’s not trying to replace your sound system.
It’s not chasing volume, gimmicks, or trends.

It’s meant to live in the background—until you notice it.

It’s for:

  • evenings that slow down

  • music that supports the moment instead of dominating it

  • people who appreciate weight, material, and intention

Sometimes it’s playing.
Sometimes it’s silent.
Both feel correct.

If that sounds boring, this probably isn’t for you. And that’s okay.

Why I Kept Going

At any point, I could’ve stopped.

I could’ve said, “This is good enough.”
I could’ve outsourced it.
I could’ve simplified it into something easier to scale.

But the entire point was to build something I’d want to keep. Something I’d be proud to set down and walk away from without needing to explain it.

This speaker exists because I couldn’t let it go until it felt right.

Not perfect.
Right.

The Honest Ending

CigarTone isn’t the result of market research or trend forecasting. It’s the result of curiosity, patience, and caring more than was strictly necessary.

I make these one at a time, by hand, because that’s the only way this object makes sense.

If you end up with one, you’re not buying hype.
You’re buying the outcome of a long, thoughtful process that didn’t rush, didn’t cut corners, and didn’t try to be louder than it needed to be.

It doesn’t need to exist.

But now that it does, I think you’ll understand why it couldn’t be anything else.