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BIRTH OF A NEW BRAND: FLOR DE JARDIN

Plus: new jars, but U.S. cigar imports decline in January

Los Angeles, April 5 – How do new brands start? What makes someone want to bring a new brand to market in the face of more than 1,000 already there?

Flor de Jardin made its first commercial splash at last week’s National Association of Tobacco Outlets (NATO) exposition in Las Vegas. Owner Michael Makens was busy at the booth, welcoming buyers and handing out samples of his new line.

It’s only the beginning of the business, but it was also the culmination of three years of work since Makens fell head over heels for a cigar he tried at a tiny factory in Danli, Honduras. “Everything about that first experience was amazing. It was and still is the best cigar I have ever smoked.”

He bought two bundles and promised to keep in touch with his new friends. Three years later, his Flor de Jardin brand was on the show floor in Las Vegas and being sampled by retailers who can bring his cigar to the public.

The line comes in five sizes, featuring natural-shade wrappers from Ecuador or maduro wrappers from Nicaragua:

> Churchill: 7 inches by 48 ring;

> Corona: 6 1/2 x 42;

> Lancero: 7 1/2 x 38;

> Robusto: 5 x 50, and

> Torpedo: 6 1/2 x 52.

All sizes use a Nicaraguan-grown binder and filler leaves from Honduras and Nicaragua. The strength is mild-to-medium for the natural-shade wrappers, but more medium-bodied for the maduro-wrapped editions. They are aimed at the top half of the market and retail for between $6-12 per stick, depending on size.

For starters, Makens has placed Flor de Jardin in fine dining establishments in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, close to his Bedford, Texas headquarters. With the NATO show as a springboard, let’s see if his passion intersects with the interests of smokers nationwide. For now, he’s concentrating on the production of cigars which showcase the mellow taste he remembers from his three-years-ago trip to Honduras. “I will only produce as many cigars as I can and still guarantee the quality.”

Jarhead alert:
After years of being forgotten, cigar jars are suddenly making a welcome comeback. This elegant packaging option is now available on three brands, at least for the time being:

• H. Upmann Vintage Cameroon jars were introduced at the RTDA show last year and have been a hit. Unlike previous Upmann jars which date back to the 1920s in Cuba, this edition is more of a souvenir than a “box”: the cigars come wrapped in a bundle, which sits in the bottom of the jar, which is quite a bit larger than the bundle.

• At the NATO Show, the re-emergence of the Adan y Eva (Adam and Eve) brand also included the elegant porcelain jars for the Belicosos (5 1/2 x 52 torpedo) and Figurados (5 1/2 x 52 perfecto) sizes (pictured above). These were left over from the 2003 Limited Edition, when the brand was introduced. At that time, a total of 1,000 jars – housing 25 cigars each – were made and most are still available.

• The newest collector’s jar is a special edition made for Cigars International. Keith Meier and his team have a close relationship with Kaizad Hansotia and the Gurkha brand, resulting in a noteworthy sampler called the “Gurkha Blendmaster.”

It contains 24 cigars inside a Bone China Stilton jar: eight each of special production robustos (5 inches by 52 ring) of the Gurkha Master’s Select, Gurkha Regent and a Connecticut-wrapped edition of the Master’s Select series. It’s reasonably priced at $110.00 and Meier says he has only 2,000 available (that is, until he places the next order . . .)

Premium cigar imports slow in January:
After the superheated end to a 2004 which saw imports of premium cigars surpass 300 million, imports cooled in January 2005.

Figures reported by the Cigar Association of America showed that January imports of premium cigars from the 10 major exporting countries dropped by 15.2% from 11.34 million sticks in 2004 to 9.62 million. It’s a small decrease, almost all of it from the Dominican Republic, where imports dropped by more than 38% year-over-year.

The CAA also noted that premium cigar imports for all of 2004 were revised to 304,535,000 after all machine-made cigars from the Dominican Republic were accounted for. It’s still the largest import total since the last year of the Cigar Boom in 1998.
~ Rich Perelman

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