Views from a Smoke-Filled Room

LOS ANGELES – The story of how Hendrik Kelner’s Tabacos Dominicanos, founded only in 1984, came to produce the famed Davidoff cigar line that validated the growing respect for the Dominican Republic as a leading cigar-making country has nothing at all to do with Zino Davidoff...

Interviewed in his office in Santiago, Dominican Republic, during the recent ProCigar Festival, Kelner remembered the chain of events clearly.

First was the decision of Oettinger Imex, the Swiss company that owned the Davidoff brand, that it was time to leave Cuba. Davidoff cigars had been made there since 1946 and while known for decades as the finest cigars in the world, the new Cohiba brand had been gaining steam since its introduction for worldwide sale in 1982. By late 1988, the internal decision to leave Cuba had been made. The question was, where to go?

The answer came from Davidoff’s U.S. flagship store in New York at 535 Madison Avenue. Opened in 1985, it was elegant, well-managed and a draw for cigar smokers both locally and nationally. As it turned out, the three best-selling brands in the store in 1988 happened to be the new Avo line, Ashton and The Griffin’s. All happened to be made at a hot new factory called Tabadom.

Located in Santiago, Tabadom had only recently joined a list of six major facilities in the area that also included Consolidated Cigar (now Altadis U.S.A.) factory, General Cigar Dominicana, Tabacalera A. Fuente, La Aurora and MATASA. But the Consolidated, General and Fuente factories were also attached to existing distribution arms and might not give the Davidoff the attention it needed. And since Tabadom was already making the top three sellers in the Davidoff store, why not try them first?

Samples were ordered and the head of Oettinger Imex, Ernst Schneider, invited Kelner to a meeting in July, 1989, and gave him an order for 125,000 cigars to be delivered in several months. Those cigars became the Davidoff Grand Cru line and the Davidoff No. 1 and No. 2 sizes for the U.S. only.

Kelner was happy with the order, but he noted that he didn’t really know he had the contract for Davidoff until three months later. That when he got the big one: an order for 3,000,000 cigars, enough to launch the new Davidoff brand in Europe in May of 1990 followed by a famous U.S. launch party where Kelner finally met the brand namesake on November 11 in New York.

It was a big step up for Kelner, who made 2.7 million cigars in total in 1989, but 5.5 million in 1990. The contract for Davidoff cost him the Ashton production, which brand owner Robert Levin moved to its current home at the Tabacalera A. Fuente in 1990. But it was the start of a major upward move for Kelner, now one of the world’s elite cigar makers with an annual production of more than 31 million cigars . . . including 10.5 million Davidoffs in 2007.

(Rich Perelman is editor-in-chief of CigarCyclopedia.com, offering comprehensive daily coverage of cigars, accessories, issues, people and prices at www.CigarCyclopedia.com).

Rich Perelman

3/10/08

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