We’d just enjoyed an evening at BURN by Rocky Patel, the cigar maker’s cigar bar and lounge in Naples, Fla.; there were drinks, dancing, live music, and plenty of Rocky Patel cigars enjoyed by a crowd of a couple hundred. The demographic: mostly millionaire retirees. A mere 10 hours later we were touching down at Pittsburgh International where the newest BURN location was slated to open. The two cities are diametrically opposed to one another and yet here was Rocky Patel applying a business model that worked in sunny, flaunty Naples to a city known more for its blue-collar, sports-crazed culture. On top of that, he’s doing it at a time when most of the cigar industry is hedging and consolidating for fear of increased regulation.
Photography by Dan Speicher
Cigar industry meet Rocky, Rocky meet the cigar industry.
Things started simply enough. Rocky, then a Hollywood lawyer, met Indian Tabac’s founder Phil Zanghi at the Grand Havana Room in Beverly Hills in 1995. Soon after, Rocky was Phil’s partner in the growing cigar company. But Rocky’s heart still wasn’t in it.
“We really started making cigars as a hobby and pretty soon I had invested way more money into this hobby than I ever envisioned,” said Rocky.
With his partner handling the tobacco side of the business in Honduras, Rocky began pushing the product in the States. He was a natural.
“There were cigar makers who would do an event and they felt that the purpose of the event was for them to sit in a corner smoking their cigars and that just doesn’t work,” recalled Corona Cigar Company founder Jeff Borysiewicz. “But Rocky always got it. He always engaged the customers and he was energetic and hard-working and he would sell them on his cigars.”
A couple of years into the partnership, Phil and Rocky amicably parted ways when Phil decided to step away from the company. In addition to sales, Rocky now had to take on the responsibility of tobacco sourcing and production — something he admittedly knew nothing about.
“I had a cigar company, but didn’t know anything about tobacco, premium cigars, Honduras, Nicaragua, Dominican, none of it,” said Rocky. He also couldn’t help but hear the naysayers who were sure Rocky’s foray into cigars would fail. “They said this is a business that is handed down from generation to generation. You have to be of Latin descent or Cuban descent.”
Doubters said success would be impossible for an outsider like Rocky, in part, because he didn’t know anything or anyone. He wouldn’t be able to purchase the raw materials he needed because he didn’t have the relationships.
“And they were quite right,” said Rocky as we smoked our cigars, paired with Barolo, on couches at Pittsburgh’s BURN just before its official opening. “It was very difficult for me to go out to the Plasencias or the Oliva family and say at that time, ‘I want five bales of tobacco or 10 bales of tobacco.’ But at the same time when someone tells me I can’t do something it gets my antlers up.”
So he ended up going to Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic to start the learning process.
“I started asking a lot of stupid questions. Started seeing what people were doing right, what people were doing wrong. I start working in farms, in the curing and the fermentation. I made thousands and thousands of blends to educate my palate,” he said. As he began to get his bearings, one thing stuck out to him. “The key to making a quality cigar was starting with good ingredients — in other words getting good, quality tobacco. And that was the biggest challenge.”
At this point the company was just barely getting by in terms of quality. They were buying raw materials from whomever would sell to them and having their cigars made by a couple of different factories. You see this often with small brand owners who don’t have control of the sourcing and manufacturing process. They’ll buy a little tobacco from this vendor today, a little tobacco from this other guy tomorrow. Sometimes it’s fermented properly, oftentimes it isn’t. It makes consistency almost impossible from batch to batch. Rocky credits this problem as the biggest reason that the Indian Tabac brand never took off.
Turning the corner
By 1999 it was time for a change. That’s when Rocky moved the operation to Florida and took control of his own destiny. That’s also the time he met the Plasencia family. Rocky pitched Nestor Plasencia on the idea that he let Rocky manage his own production inside of Plasencia’s factory so that Rocky’s cigars would be made in accordance with Rocky’s specifications. It was an unusual agreement at that time. If you had a factory make you a private label, you both agreed on the blend and the private label brand owner just placed orders with the factory, mostly over the phone.
“The Plasencias gave me that opportunity and for the first several years we butted heads a lot. I wanted more time on the tobacco, more curing on the tobacco. I wanted to stop production if the fourth priming ran out. I wouldn’t use the fifth or the sixth and they said that was crazy and I was wasting money.”
Rocky stood firm because he had insights on American premium cigar consumers that no industry veteran could match. He was on the road more than anyone, interacting with smokers night after night. And he was hearing the complaints first-hand when a consumer could tell when the cigar was off.
He was right; the American premium cigar smoker was changing. They were devouring information about cigars that had never been available to them and that information was affecting what cigars they were buying.
“As much as people kind of gave me credit for being on the road and burning a lot of shoe leather and doing creative marketing, I think the real reason we succeeded is because we had brands that were very, very consistent, cigar to cigar and box to box,” Rocky said. “And it didn’t come across by accident.”
Rocky was deliberate about practically everything, but one of his most iconic brands was born almost by accident.
When UST (US Tobacco) decided to get out of the premium cigar business, they were sitting on $80 or $90 million dollars’ worth of raw materials. Two of the tobaccos that he saw caught his attention, the aged Sumatra wrapper and the aged Broadleaf wrapper they were growing in Talanga. He immediately tried to buy it all but that’s not what the UST guys had in mind.
“They said, ‘You can’t buy it but we’ll give it to you if you make cigars out of our factory.’ So I worked on 120 blends, and believe it or not the first one that I made was the one that was chosen. I still remember the blend by heart. Both have the same filler and binder, Dominican Olor and Dominican Piloto. We have one leaf of Brazilian Mata Fina, we have ligero from Esteli, viso from Jalapa and a Mexican binder. Then the aged Sumatra wrapper for one and the Broadleaf from Talanga for the other.”
Those were the blends for the Vintage 1990 and Vintage 1992, which are still two of the best-selling blends in Rocky Patel’s portfolio. But there was one more hurdle to clear. How would he be able to ensure quality with UST the way he had at Plasencia? When they’d settled on the blends, Rocky made his pitch.
“There’s only one way I’ll make cigars here,” Rocky said. “You allow me carte blanche to go to the sorting department and train everybody on how I want the wrapper, filler and binder sorted and what primings we’re using. They have to stay consistent with that. Then I want to limit the bunchers and rollers to making only 300 cigars per day. We’re going to bunch in an accordion fashion and every cigar has to be draw tested.”
They went for it. He now had two big factories with massive stores of quality raw material making cigars the way he wanted them made and with the materials he wanted to use. By 2002, Indian Tabac Cigar Company became Rocky Patel Premium Cigars. The company was coming off successful releases with the Vintage lines and The Edge (which remains the best-selling brand in Rocky’s lineup). They had manufacturing under control by running a “factory within a factory” with not just Plasencia’s El Paraiso factory, but also at UST’s factory, both in Danlí.
“I think I was spending close to 50 or 60 percent of my time at the factories — maybe 70 in the early days,” Rocky said. “I was basically at the factory, if not every week, every other week.”
And when he wasn’t at the factory, he was on the road doing events. This was the time period when Rocky cemented his reputation as the hardest working man in the cigar business. His work paid off, the company had turned the corner. They’d survived the cigar boom and subsequent bust and had come out on the other side with a wealth of industry knowledge, relationships, and a reputation for unwavering quality and consistency.
“When the demand came around, we stopped making certain brands if we didn’t have the right wrapper or the right binder or the right priming in the filler.”
They released the highly acclaimed Rocky Patel Decade to celebrate the company’s 10th anniversary and it was another home run. “We noticed that when we really paid attention to quality, our brands succeeded,” Rocky said. “That’s all. It was that simple. Of course it helped that I was doing events and it helped that I was one of the first guys on the road building relations that got the product onto the shelf. But to get the product off the shelf and into the consumer’s hands, and for them to keep buying it, it had to be quality.”
In my conversations with cigar manufacturers at all levels, the one challenge they always mention is consistency — making a great cigar day in and day out in spite of ever changing conditions. Rocky added, “Yeah, you can make a few consistently, but when you get into making volume and all the different brands and all of the different blends that we have, that becomes a much bigger challenge.”
His staunch devotion to quality and consistency, coupled with a rigorous travel schedule, took its toll. Around 2008, rumors started to emerge that Rocky’s health was failing. There was talk that he was suffering from heart problems as a result of the hard life he was living.
“When I was at the factory, I’d smoke 12, 15, sometimes 16 cigars a day because you’re blending and blending and blending,” Rocky said. All that in addition to cigars he would smoke with tour groups visiting the factory and while on the road in the States. “They’d come on a Sunday to Wednesday and you’re up all night with them drinking and smoking. I did it for a solid 8 to 10 years. Now we’re no longer doing that, but that was a long run.
“I was getting nervous like, ‘What? Am I going to have a heart attack?’ I was going to the doctors to get everything checked out and they’re like, ‘Trust me, the last thing you’re going to die from is a heart attack.’”
The doctors assured Rocky that his heart was in good shape and that instead he was having a different, less serious problem. “It was acid reflux. I’d never had it so I didn’t know what it was like but you get an anxiety, shortness of breath and you don’t sleep enough.” Although he was relieved, the scare seemed to jolt him into action. “I spend a lot of time at the gym and I eat very healthy. I probably don’t smoke as many cigars as I used to and I enjoy my wine instead of my single malt Scotch and I feel much healthier. I feel great. It’s all part of balance.”
If a heart attack won’t get you, the FDA will
As Rocky’s business kept growing and expanding, he found himself leaning more and more on his brother Nish and his cousin Nimish Desai for support in the business. Without them taking the load off Rocky, there’s no way he’d be available to fight against FDA overregulation.
“Unfortunately, now I spend less time at the factories but I am spending more time in Washington D.C. Every time something happens, the first guy they call is me and I show up. And I understand, Jorge Padrón’s got a lot on his plate with his father passed away, so he’s gotta be in Nicaragua more often. And the same with Carlito Fuente. I’m available and so I spend a lot of time in D.C.”
I didn’t expect modesty on this topic after listening to Rocky spearhead the weekly FDA call with fellow cigar makers, lawyers, lobbyists, and representatives from the CRA and IPCPR. But there he was, telling me how he takes the lead on it because he has the time. While it’s true that Jorge and Carlito are both busier than ever, you would be missing the point if you thought that was the only reason. Rocky is clearly the most qualified of the cigar makers to take the lead on these legal and political matters. I asked him to break down what he spends time on in a typical month.
“I would say it’s probably about 30 percent on Rocky Patel Premium Cigars, 20 percent on Rocky Patel BURN, and 50 percent on FDA. Every morning after the gym, I come home and my entire morning is consumed until 1 p.m. with FDA stuff — whether it’s conference calls, or talking to the lawyers, and that doesn’t count getting on planes and going to Washington and walking the halls of Congress and the Senate. I mean it just goes on and on and on. Then there’s raising money, these lawsuits have to be paid for. That’s a big battle, you know, dealing with our guys on policy. Yeah, it’s a lot of work.”
Rocky Patel is leading the premium cigar industry in this fight, and he’s playing against the odds.
And after intense lobbying and with the new FDA commissioner, Dr. Gottlieb, in addition to the lawsuit that was filed, the FDA has come back to the industry and said they’re willing to take a new look at premium cigars and whether they are to be regulated or not, or whether they should be regulated differently. He also cited a series of studies commissioned by the FDA, the results of which have been beneficial to the premium cigar business.
“Essentially the first study came out to show that the average age of a cigar smoker is almost 25 years old. Most cigar smokers don’t smoke more than one cigar per month. Another states that there is no change in mortality rate if you smoke one or less cigar per day. Now these will all published in publications like the New England Journal of Medicine and they were all commissioned by CTP (Center for Tobacco Products) or the FDA. So these are their own studies. This is going to help us a lot in the new lawsuit that was filed in the district of Texas.
Photography by Dan Speicher
Frenzied Expansion
As many cigar manufacturers have been feverishly preparing for the end of days by cutting back drastically or consolidating, Rocky has been just as feverishly planning his expansion. Since opening his first lounge in Naples 8 years ago, Rocky’s been working and designing the next BURN. So to walk up to the new Rocky Patel BURN in Pittsburgh alongside Rocky himself was quite an experience. I thought he’d be giddy with excitement when we headed to his new Pittsburgh lounge. I know I was. Instead, after posing for a shot for social media, he immediately went to work dismantling the place. That is, he dismantled it with a notepad. This bannister is loose. The humidor isn’t bright enough and there’s not enough space for product. Why is this ashtray on the featured island instead of this other one?
And that’s before he started tasting food and drinks. He and his team worked through every single detail until they’d either fixed what was wrong in his eyes or a plan was in place to correct it.
Even before construction on the first BURN started in Florida, Rocky had been mulling the concept over for a number of years.
“I had this concept in my head but I kept getting pushback from my brother and Dave Bullock (Rocky Patel’s VP of Sales) because they kept thinking I was going to compete against our retailers who had supported us for so long. That was never my vision. My idea was to grow the premium cigar category. Every year, I kept looking at the import data and I kept seeing that the premium cigar category was increasing by one percent, two percent, three percent,” said Rocky. “If you look, all of a sudden craft beer is a big deal. If you look at bourbons, they’re on the rise. People are looking to enjoy finer things in life. They’re certainly not going to do it where there’s no place to smoke in places like New York or California. Certainly in the winter, people can’t smoke outside there. So we wanted to create an atmosphere where people our age can go. Where you can have a nice single malt scotch or glass of wine, possibly something to eat and smoke a cigar.”
I’ve personally seen Rocky’s vision for BURN play out on several occasions; where an adult comes in for the ambiance and selection of high-end spirits and enjoys a cigar for the first time.
With BURN lounges in Naples, Pittsburgh, and Oklahoma City already open to the public — and Atlanta and Indianapolis slated to open before the end of 2018 — Rocky’s all in on the BURN concept. I asked Rocky if, after opening his fifth BURN, he would take a break in 2019. His response was classic Rocky.
“No, no! I want to open in Nashville. I want to open in Houston. I wouldn’t mind opening one in Tampa or the West Palm area. So I have a few other places in my head.”
Along the way, there’s no question that he has carved his own path as he learned the premium cigar business on the fly, found his niche in a market dominated by Hispanic sounding names, and opened three world-class lounges that personify his brand. He’s brought his family into the business and built a team that frees him up to defend the industry against federal overreach. I asked one final question: “When you look back at this family business that you’ve built, what are you most proud of?”
“I think the legacy that we’ve created with the brand is about making it when nobody thought I could make it in the cigar business. I’m sure there are a lot of people betting against me now and that’s what I’m most proud of. I beat all the odds. It’s a different path that I took. I’m most proud that I did it my way.”
