No Sleep Since Brooklyn

Born in New York, one small cigar manufacturer thinks big – very big

by Nick Kolakowski

By all rights an initially underfunded cigar company created by a pair of Brooklyn college buddies should have sunk. When your gringo blender ends up sleeping on a Nicaraguan mattress for three-and-a-half years, when you march out there and not take the easy route – that’d be slapping your band on someone else’s sticks and calling it your baby – but instead try to become an actual manufacturer… that’s usually the stuff from which shattered dreams are made.

Drew Estate survived its tumultuous birth and lived to tell. With 22 percent growth last year, and long-established brands like ACID growing 15 percent per annum, the company stands poised for longevity. “Growth can be a killer; a company that went from zero in sales and no cash to our point, now, it’s a tough scenario,” says Steven Saka, the company’s president, from his office in Miami. “At this point, we’re healthy.”

Not to mention different. During the cigar boom of the mid-‘90s, various up-and-coming cigar companies positioned themselves as the inheritor of some sort of tobacco history mantle. While they might have been operating out of a cheap storefront, and one out of every ten of their cigars was guaranteed to taste like burning shoe leather, but their grandfather was once a roller so…you could trust them. Saka puts it succinctly: “People pretend to be something they’re not so they can sell product. That’s not who we are.”

Indeed, even before Jonathan Drew and Marvin Samel started up their Nicaraguan factory in 1998 (a few years after abandoning their finance and law careers to open a small cigar kiosk in the World Trade Center Mall), there was never an attempt to imbue the company with a false lore, or pump out brands simply to capitalize on the tastes du jour – they were far too busy for that. Drew relocated to Nicaragua and established meaningful relationships with the locals, gradually overcoming their distrust that he was just another hustler looking to buy a couple hundred thousand cigars and put a band on them. Granted, it involved sleeping on the aforementioned mattress, but the two of them persevered. In that spirit, their products – whether ACID, a hipster brand that trumpets its Brooklyn roots, or their flavored cigar lines, or La Vieja Habana, the kind of sticks you would find in the humidor of an old-style Cuban restaurant – have all been managed with an eye toward the long-term. Which is partially about applying the same eye toward quality and consistency as larger cigar companies – but it also involves a bit of marketing.

“All our brands have specific and separate identities; a brand like ACID has a very urban, current feeling, but if you held a box of Chateau Real, it’s as traditional as you get,” describes Saka, who joined the fledgling company from JR Cigars. “If you look at all of our brands, each has its own individual identity.” It also means that, if one brand fails, it won’t harm the others by association. Still, if ACID does well, it gives Drew Estate brands a stronger chance of earning a space on a retailer’s shelf. In this way, the company has been modeling itself after the stalwarts of the industry, like Altadis, which can have a stable of 20 independent brands; that’s the secret, the people at Drew Estate feel, of longevity in the industry. And while the company’s heart may remain in its native Brooklyn, its hands are definitely in Nicaragua, where the Drew Estate factory now extends to 96,000 square feet and employs 785 workers. Despite the company’s impressive success – certainly enough for much larger fish to consider purchasing it – challenges still exist.

First and foremost is dealing with its growing pains. Sure, you can want to sell $100 million in cigars, and yeah, you might want twice as many employees within three years – however, you need to tackle the realities, including a limited pool of skilled workers. Not that Drew Estate’s founders plan on following in the footsteps of certain boutique manufacturers who deliberately capped their production at an annual few million cigars…but it’s also a reminder that they need to cross every ‘t’ and dot every ‘i’ in order to realize all of their dreams. “We’re all about growing,” affirms Saka. “And being competitive.”

DREW ESTATE:
FOUNDED: 1995
COMPANY HEADQUARTERS: Miami, Florida
FOUNDERS: Jonathan Drew and Marvin Samel
PRESIDENT: Steven Saka
ANNUAL CIGAR PRODUCTION: 14 million
RETAIL PRESENCE: 2,400 shops
MAJOR BRANDS: ACID, Liga Privada, Chateau Real, La Vieja Habana