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Old 04-17-2017, 09:04 AM   #1
Lew
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Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: NJ & Fl
Posts: 75
The Most Under-rated cigars

I posted this on another BB, so I figured I should post it here too ....

THE MOST UNDER-RATED CIGAR IN THE WORLD !

As most of you know, I retired a number of years ago, so the following is not a sales pitch to sell you anything because I don’t sell cigars anymore (although I still have a minority interest in a couple of cigar factories) …. I just stay home and sit around listening to my arteries hardening…. But… I saw this post about under-rated cigars and I figured I’d write something about the most under-rated cigars in history…. Naturally, one that I invented !

It all began in the mid 1970’s when my wife and I had a tiny little cigar store on the corner of 45th St and 6th Avenue in mid-town Manhattan. As I recall, the store was 14 ft. wide and 31 ft. long, but the sign outside said “World’s Largest Cigar Store” !!! Who knew that in just a few years that’s exactly what it would become !

Anyway, to make a very long story just long, and not to put you to sleep before I get to the heart of the story, I was in love with the cigars made by Danby-Palicio (which would become Villazon & Co., and then become part of General Cigar, which is now part of the Scandanavian Tobacco Group). And the best sellers of the cigars they made were the Punch and Hoyo de Monterrey Rothschilds, a chunky little 4.5 inch by 50 ring gauge cigar that came in boxes of 50, uncellophaned and unbanded….. and when you opened a box of these little gems the aroma that hit you was just incredible….. almost a half century later, I can still recall the experience like it was yesterday. It’s like opening a vacuum sealed can of ground coffee and this incredible aroma hits you like a thunderbolt.

Well, I guess because I liked this cigar so much, I pretty much made just about anyone who stepped into our store try at least one Hoyo or Pinch Rothschild, and pretty soon we were selling them like hotcakes.

Then an idea struck me, and I called Danny Blumenthal who was a co-owner of Villazon and in charge of sales and distribution. His partner, Frank Llaneza (maybe the best tobacco man that ever lived) handled the manufacturing end. And I said I wanted to buy the Hoyo and Punch Rothschilds in bundles instead of boxes, and I wanted them at a much cheaper price….. and he said “that would cut into his sales of the boxed versions, so the answer is NO”

Then I said: “Listen, I’m going to do this with you or without you. All your Rothschilds are packed in the boxes unbanded anyway , so if I have someone else make the same size cigars for me without cigar bands and start selling them who’s gonna know, and you come up a loser. BUT, if you make them for me at a lower price, then I’ll sell them as AN ALTERNATIVE to your Hoyos and Punch to people who can’t afford to spend 60 cents a cigar (yes… that was the price back then….today those same Rothschilds are $5.25…. PLUS State Taxes….. can ya believe it ????)”

Anyway… Danny did a 180 and said “Okay, we’ll do it” Well, back then the factory size for the Rothschild was #37, and those were the bundles we ordered and received, and we started selling them like crazy. Now, Frank and Dan have both passed away and so I feel it’s okay to tell you that in those days, and probably till about 1995, all the Hoyos and Punch cigars were actually the exact same thing just packed in different boxes even though when you were out of stock on one of the brands you could never convince the consumer to buy the other!

The Hoyo Rothschild was the Punch Rothschild, and the Hoyo Governor was the Punch Pita, and the Hoyo Cuban Largo was the Punch Casa Grande and so on…. And the same was true for the Alternatives to every size Punch and Hoyo Villazon eventually agreed to make for us. All we did was put a different pressure sensitive sticker on the front of the bundles to differentiate the Hoyo Alternatives from the Punch Alternatives. And…. People being what they are still bought tons of boxed Hoyos and Punches from us because they could never accept the fact that they could get a cigar that was the equal to the boxed version at a price that was WAY less. BUT…. People who could NEVER afford to buy Punch and Hoyos on a continuing basis were now able to get a cigar of the exact same quality at a price they could afford !

And again, people being what they are, if by chance one of our stores was out of the JR Alternative to the Hoyo Rothschild, people would balk at buying the JR Alternative to the Punch Rothschild and swear they were completely different cigars !

In those early days some of the biggest selling brands were actually machine made, long filler cigars like Bering Plazas and Corona Grandes, Gold Label Palmas, Cuesta Rey 95’s, Garcia Vega Napoleans, etc. And these people were already paying pretty close to the price that our handmade ALTERNATIVES were selling for…. And in droves they started making the jump from machine made cigars to handmade cigars….. and our business and Villazon’s started going through the roof. In fact, sometimes we had to be careful because the factory would make a mistake and our Alternatives would come in with the real cigar bands on them…. And to protect Dan and Frank we would do our best to isolate those cigars and sell them individually under their respective brand names…. But in all honesty, every now and then some bundles would slip through because the banded cigars were in the middle of the bundle where we couldn’t see them….. and this made even more consumers aware that they could smoke a quality handmade cigar for just about the same price as they were already paying for machine mades! It was a no brainer !

Well, within a few short years our Alternatives were actually out-selling the real brands even though those Hoy and Punch cigars were in hundreds of stores throughout the country and our Alternatives were just sold in our stores and our burgeoning mail order business.

My momma didn’t raise no fool, and so in pretty quick order we started making Alternatives to just about everything that came out of Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republ;ic…. And eventually, just about every cigar company made JR Alternatives for us… General (now STG), Consolidated (now ITG), MATASA, Fuente, Perdomo, NACSA, Plasencia, Carbonell, Puros Santa Clara, and a number who are no longer in business or no longer alive! Don’t forget a lotta what I’m describing happened 40 plus years ago.

Well, the biggest handmade cigars of the 70’s were Macanudo and Don Diego. Edgar Cullman owned the Macanudo brand back then, and CITSA (Compania Insular de Tabacos S,A) owned the Don Diego brand,,,,, both were pretty similar cigars. Mild, Connecticut wrapped and I’m not sure who was copying who, but that type of cigar was the consumers’ preference back then, and the Corona 5.5 x 42 ring, and the Lonsdale 6.5 x 42/43 ring were the big sellers (this was way before fat ring sized cigars took over the market) and neither company would agree to make JR Alernatives for us. BUT… every other cigar maker on the planet was also trying to make a cigar just like those Macanudos and Don Diegos….. and one day I smoked a cigar that was a dead ringer for either of them, it was called Ricardo Samuel. This brand was distributed by Faber, Coe, and Gregg, a giant wholesaler back then and a company that had formerly had almost a monopoly on the importation of Cuban Cigars prior to the embargo.

A lady that worked for them named Jenny Betancourt let slip one day the name of the manufacturer who was making them…. Manuel Quesada of MATASA in the Dominican Republic.
And I figured this would be the guy we could use to make Macanudo and Don Diego Alternatives because his Ricardo Samuel cigars were, in my opinion, indistinguishable from the real McCoy. And so I got my very first passport and made my first trip out of the United States and flew to the D.R. to meet him.

Well, Faber, Coe, and Gregg was Manuel’s largest customer at the time and a) he didn’t know me from Adam, and b) he didn’t want to get them angry with him. So it took some convincing to get him to make bundled cigars for us, but boy how well that turned out for both of us, as we became by far and away the largest customer he ever had. In fact, I’m sure that we represented more than 50% of his business for the next 30 or 40 years.

And… the JR Alternatives to the hot selling Macanudos and Don Diegos exploded in sales because not only were the cigars so similar in every respect, but there were continuous shortages and out of stock conditions on the actual boxed brands, so people were almost forced into discovering a cigar of similar quality at a completely dis-similar price !!!

But, we weren’t finished making JR Alternatives, because there were a couple of big brands that had African Cameroon wrappers on them and I had to find a manufacturer that could make Alternatives for us that would be acceptable knock offs of the Dunhill Montecruz and Partagas brands. Those were the two big guns when it came to Cameroon wrapped cigars.

So my next trip out of the United States was again to the DR., and this time to Carlos Fuente. He had Cameroon wrapper! And we started bringing in bundles of 20 from him call NN4 and NN77. These were his factory sizes for the Corona and the Lonsdale. To make a long story short, two years later I revisited Carlos’s factory. The rolling floor was divided longitudinally down the center, and Carlos told me the entire left half of the factory rolled nothing but JR Alternative bundles for us. The other side made everything else. So,,,, between our bundles and the Fuente, Moyo, Montessino, and other cigars we bought from him, we probably represented more than 2/3 rds of all the cigars he made.

I don’t have any exact numbers, but the handmade cigar industry was pretty much in cruise control during most of the 1980’s and I guess imports hovered around the 100 million mark for the majority of the decade. And here’s a fact that’s just hard to believe…. Between our heavier bodied JR Alternatives from Nicaragua (until the Sandanista revolution) and Honduras, and our lighter bodied JR Alternatives from the DR and Jamaica, and our Alternatives to Te Amo that were made by Jorge Ortiz of Santa Clara in Mexico…. We were selling over 11 MILLION JR Alternatives per year…. In other words, probably 10% of all the handmade cigars sold in America were JR Alternatives…. It was unreal ! The JR Alternative was by far and away the largest selling handmade brand in the country, and although I don’t have any real numbers to back me up, I would not be surprised if that was still the case today, 40 years later.

In the ensuing years we would add to the JR Alternative line as new brands hit the market or suddenly became popular, and we would always try to make a product as close as possible to whatever brand we were emulating, and do it at a massively lower price. In hindsight, I think we priced them too cheaply because the public just cannot accept the fact that they can get a great cigar at a price that doesn’t break the bank. And to this day there are still people who disparage the brand because they cannot accept the fact that you can buy a quality product at a fair price.

I am sure that every single person that has read this has been in Nordstroms or Bloomingdales, or (put any store name you want in here)… and seen blue jeans that sell for a hundred, two hundred, or more dollars per pair. The customers that buy those jeans just can’t get their head around the fact that sticking some designer name on the jeans doesn’t make them any better than the ones that say Wrangler or Levi….. and the same is true for handmade cigars. There’s just so much you can do to insure the quality in the manufacturing process. The add on is the brand name, the packaging, the hype, the advertising, the sales team, the “events” at local retailers, the representation and glamorous booths at conventions, the promotional cigar related junk you see advertised as “free” with the purchased of a box of high priced XYX brand cigars to make ridiculously overpriced brands seem “less over-priced”, and the ego trip that comes with showing people a cigar that has a work of art embossed band that covers half the cigar. In fact, some of the stuff I’ve seen recently have two or three cigar bands !

The other really big secret to the JR Alternative was the method by which it reached the customer. We were the owners of the “brand”, the importer, the distributor, and the retailer…… so all the other middle man profits in the chain of distribution that are built into the retail price of the brands we copied were eliminated and resulted in a staggering differential in price to the ultimate consumer….. umm…. That would be YOU.

Under-Rated?.... yeah
JR ALTERNATIVES “The World’s Most Under-Rated Brand”
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Hoyo de Monterrey Roth., J*R, J*R Alternatives, J*R Alts, J*R Cigars, Lew Rothman, Punch Rothschild
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