Cigar Retailers

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Comment by Skip Martin - Chief Hava on September 15, 2008 at 4:27am

An Open Letter To Our Customers
from Hava Cigar Shop and Lounge

We are going to Galveston tomorrow. I have tried to prepare myself for what I will find, but I know that I am not able.

This is usually the time in the week where I sign into my remote network and update the week's financials. Every week since February 2006, the ritual has been rewarding. Within the cells of the spreadsheets, and in every line of the financial statements, there was hope.

Our customer list grew every week. Each name representing a new relationship. Our inventory grew with product from an ever growing list of vendors, each representing a shared confidence in our future.

In 2006, no one gave us a chance. Almost daily I would hear about other merchants betting against us. "I don't get it," some would say. "All you sell is cigars?," they would ask. "You should turn this into a bar."

We sold $17.80 our first full day. Many days like this would follow, but we hung in there. We listened to our customers. We developed an appreciation for the hand-crafted cigar one customer, one relationship, at a time.

We hired some of the best employees working on the island. They were young, hard-working and as passionate about our vision as we were. They built our business with us. They were Aggies. They were our family.

It was fate that I became involved with the store in the first place. When my best friend from college invited me to Galveston to see the cigar store that he and Charlie were building, I thought....this probably won't last, but hey...I can get cigars at cost.

When his other business interests made continuing in the business impossible (two weeks after they had opened) he and Charlie asked me to step in. There were a million reasons to decline, but I knew that this might be my only chance to pursue my entrepreneurial dream....so I dove in. I set clear expectations...I live in Austin. I can only be in Galveston one weekend a month. I can help with the administration and management, but I can't function in a day-to-day capacity.

That lasted about three weeks.

Every time I stepped into the empty store, with sparsely stocked shelves and no decor...I saw the future. I knew where every piece of furniture would be placed. I could see the rugs and the pictures on the wall. I saw a room filled with customers, walls lined with lockers and shelves lined with open boxes of beautiful cigars.

It filled in slowly. We didn't borrow. Every month's profit was used to purchase one item at a time...a little more inventory, a few rugs, a few pictures, a new chair. We worked almost 60 hours a week, and we paid ourselves nothing.

We had a few rough spots. The retail business isn't easy. We learned about January and February's seasonality the hard way our first year. In Galveston, December's invoices don't get paid with January's revenue.

The cigar business has to be the toughest of all retail businesses. Let's face it, the tobacco industry is vilified. Every month, there is a new enemy at the gates. The taxes. The smoking ordinances. The health 'Nazis'. We spent every day spent knowing that the future was less secure for a retail tobacconist.

I understand the trend. I detest cigarettes; they are a disgusting nicotine delivery device...but a cigar is different. I don't need to explain this to you, because as your tobacconists we have developed this knowledge; an appreciation for the magnificence of the cigar. We traveled with you to Honduras where you experienced first hand the craft and labor that goes into a cigar.

We held the precious seedlings in our hands. We walked through the manicured fields. We inhaled ammonia in the curing barns. We felt the heat coming off of the 'pilons'. We laughed with the 'torcedores' that hand-roll every cigar and were awed by their dexterity and skill. We shared meals with the families that fled Cuba and built businesses that provide a decent living to thousands.

Tobacconist. Many people hear me declare the title and wonder aloud if it is even a word. Again, you do not need a definition. It is a dying profession. You may know Charlie is a barber. He used to jest that he was the 'youngest old barber' still around. Like the barber, the tobacconist is a symbol of a dying era. An era of town squares. An era before 'big box' stores. An era of moderate and responsible appreciation of tobacco.

The cigar store, like the barber shop, was a man's 'second home'. A tobacconist knew his customer's 'smoke'. He moderated local political discussion. He enabled the networking of businessmen. He shared the joy of the birth of your first child. He presided over the intimate wakes for those that had passed.

I may have shared with some of you thoughts of my father. I did not know him well. He was old when I was born, and died too soon. Like my grandfather, he was a cigar smoker. In fact, they smoked horribly constructed, cheap cigars, but I remember them and their aroma most vividly. I remember the bundles in the bottom of the tackle and tool boxes, hidden from the women who would destroy them.

I remember the circle of chairs where 'the men' would talk into the late hours of the night. If I didn't speak, and fetched the occasional Coors, I could stay close at hand...and absorb my the lessons of manhood. I learned that rain watered the fields and that the fields were a livelihood. I learned that a job at the plant was a noble endeavor. I learned that neighbors helped neighbors who had experienced 'a run of bad luck'. I learned which men in the community 'just weren't right' and which were 'good for nuthin'. I learned a little about women, but not as much as I had believed. I learned about the space between a handshake and the sanctity of 'your word'.

I bought my first cigar from Chad Chadbourne of Emerson's tobacco in Norfolk, Virginia after reading this poem on a Sunday afternoon in 1991:

CRIMSON
Chicago Poems, Carl Sandburg

CRIMSON is the slow smolder of the cigar end I hold,
Gray is the ash that stiffens and covers all silent the fire.
(A great man I know is dead and while he lies in his
coffin a gone flame I sit here in cumbering shadows
and smoke and watch my thoughts come and go.)

I think of how ridiculous I must have looked strutting through the Military Circle mall with a 9 inch cigar clinched between my teeth, clouds of smoke and disgusted shoppers in my wake.

In the past few years, I have called upon that moment, the instant I fell in love with cigars, every time things seemed rough at the store. I call on that memory now to sustain me.

I am not sure what the future holds for Hava Cigar Shop and Lounge. In one future, I see the business restored. I see my teenage daughters helping a customer in the humidor and ringing sales at the register. I see Charlie nodding off in a chair, oblivious to his surroundings....waking up every few minutes looking for a customer to share a story with.

In the other, I see the difficulty ahead and the chance that the 'dream' that was our business.... faded away in the aftermath of the storm.

I'll focus on the former....and the thoughts of my fathers; on the pride that they would surely feel if I were in their 'circle of men' holding a smoldering cigar.

Our thoughts are with you and your families.