- Patina Cigars. - Yeah. - Tell me the story. - So we started 2017 officially. - Not that long ago. - No, but long. - A lot of work. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah, so. It actually started though, everything started in 2014 with a podcast. - With what? - A podcast? - Yeah, really? - A cigar-review site. That's how it all started. - Really? - Yeah. - What were you doing before that? - I'm a CPA by background. - Seriously? - And I traded commodities. Yeah.
Yeah, corn, soybean. I worked for a grain company. - Where's home? - Chicago. - Okay. - Yeah. - Moving grain around. - Yeah. From where it was grown to where it needed to go. - And now you're in the cigar business? - Now I'm in the cigar business. How about yourself? - So when I came upon Boveda, I just spent a significant amount of my adult life in the music business. I used to road-manage bands and I ended up doing music-package development for Target and Best Buy outta Minneapolis.
Did you grow up in Chicago? - Yes, sir. - What neighborhood? - On the south side of the city called Ashburn, and then in the suburbs called Orland Park. - So you're not too far from Tinley Park in the beginning? - Mm-mm. - Yeah, and I used to sell lumber to the Edward Hines Lumber Company. - Okay, yeah. - They were all over the place. - They had that big music venue over there too. You've probably been there. - Was this new for the show? - Yeah. So we released it just before the show.
- Oro de Nicaragua. - Yes, sir. - Tell me about what I'm smoking. - Ecuador. Habano. Oscuro. - Mm. - Over Sumatra binder. - Mm. - Connecticut Broadleaf and Nicaragua in the filler. - Did you know Tags? Tom Taglia? - I did not. - Down in Chicago. Toward Indianapolis, he had a couple of... At least one store. - Okay. - He's a guy that I went to school with. - Okay. - Yeah. All Chicago guys. They all taught me how to drink. - Mm-hmm. - Which is why I gave up drinking a long time ago.
(Host laughing) - That's why I never started. - Yeah. (Mo laughing) There you go. - All right? - Yeah. Mm. Oh, that's beautiful. And the wrapper. That's a unique wrapper. - Yeah, it's nice. - It's got a nice, oily finish to it. What am I tasting? - Greatness? - Yeah, I'm tasting... (both laughing) I'm tasting greatness. (Mo speaks indistinctly) - What do you put in this? Greatness. - Yeah. - That's good. - Yeah. Nah. - Mmm. So you've known our guys from the get go.
- Oh man. Yeah. I've known Nate [Beck] for at least three years. - Is that him singing right now? - Probably. - It could be him. - At least three. JP [Awad], I met last year, I think. And then Mike [Stous]... I don't even know... Where is Mike? - Stous is around. - Yeah. - Stous in the house. - Yeah. Last year, the year before. So yeah, man, I've known them a little bit. Good guys. - This has met your expectations? The dream of having a cigar line? It's been a lot of work.
- It's exceeded it in some ways and... I didn't think it was gonna be easier. It's not any harder than I thought it would be because I figured it would be really hard. I wasn't under any delusions that it was just gonna happen overnight. And just like anything in life, if it's not an organic growth, you're on a faulty foundation and you're more likely to have a bigger fall.
But if you're building along the way and there's, like, a step-by-step process to it, foundation is strong, your mistakes are made at the appropriate levels versus being high up and making a mistake that could bring you all the way down. So each mistake is a learning lesson and is recoverable. So that's how I look at it. But yeah, man, it's been really hard, and establishing legitimacy is the first step. And thankfully, I think we've done that in a lot of... At least within the industry.
Now, it's like, how do we get that to the consumer? And that's the biggest part. - Hm. - So. - This is awesome. - Thank you. - You gotta be super proud of this. Who makes your cigars? - Nicaraguan American [Tobaccos S.A.] Master Blender, Raul Disla is the guy I work with. Phenomenal. Gus Cura is the tobacco guy and I just gotta mention them because not a lot of people know them and they're the engine that makes it all go in there. So. - I've had a great experience with your cigars.
- Thank you, sir. - It's such a privilege to sit with you. - No, man. Privilege is mine. - Yeah, no, it's cool. It's... We've had a chance at this particular show to talk to some legends in the industry. We sat with Litto [Gomez]. - Yeah. - And heard his story. Last year, we sat with Carlito [Fuente]. - Yeah, I saw it. - He's really a significant reason why Boveda has been successful because he was the first adopter. He took a risk on Boveda. - Oh yeah, yeah. - He agreed. - Yeah. Yeah.
- Yeah, he took it on. It became a part of his culture. - Yeah, absolutely. - And your personal experience with the men and women in this room over the... It's really not that... I mean, it must seem really long in some respects, but five, six, seven years, really, or eight years, seven years, eight years from... It's as long as my career with Boveda. - Yeah. Yeah. - Lots happened in that period of time. - A lot. A lot of changes.
So, you know, the first cigar I ever did was actually with James Brown of Black Label Trading for my podcast that I was doing with my buddy, Drew. And that kind of introduced everything in the world of cigar making. And the landscape since then until now, is vastly different. Not only in the way cigars are sold, but the way cigars are consumed. And COVID was a big catalyst in that change, too. - Sure.
- We're facing a really interesting time, I think, that's been unprecedented in most of our lifetimes, like, in terms of a global scale and financially speaking. So my biggest thing is like, how is the cigar industry gonna navigate that changing economic environment going forward? So that's more of what I think is gonna be the biggest change for us going for the next couple of years. - Say more about that. What's the challenge to the industry as we know it today?
Where do you see the biggest roadblock to overcome? - Well, I think the... We've seen inflationary pressure, which, you know, whether it's cigars, the grocery store. I mean, you can't go to McDonald's for under $20 anymore. Not if you're having a self-respected meal. - Used to be five bucks. - Yeah. It used to be five bucks. Dollar menus, they didn't exist. So the cigar industry has not been immune to those pressures as well. I mean, things are just more expensive.
Now, the thought was, if we make money harder to get, and we raise interest rates and it's harder to borrow money, we're gonna get less money sloshing around in the system and this and that. But by and large, that really hasn't happened. So you still have a lot of money in the system that's chasing whatever.
And the cigar industry has seen an influx of money from new entrants, you know, so more people wanting tobacco, the cannabis industry wanting some of the wrapper leaf and things like that, so all those trickle-down effects that make it more expensive to do business. And I think that's gonna continue for the foreseeable future.
- And I walk around this floor and I look at some of these newer lines, and there's some people that are doing a really excellent job, and the retailers are like, "Where am I gonna put them? Where am I gonna put these? How am I gonna shoehorn these guys in?" - Absolutely. Yeah. It's very competitive out there right now and there's a lot of really, really good cigars.
But the amazing thing is you always seem to find your niche and you find those stores that really kind of want to be a part of what you're doing. - Mm-hmm. Like Cigar Jones. - Yeah. Yeah. - You find there's a regional concentration because you're from the Midwest? Do you think there's a natural- - No, actually. No. It's interesting. It's kind of really spread out. You know, Chicago obviously is very strong, but yeah, Arizona, Philadelphia, those are some of my biggest markets.
So we're trying to build Texas and we're doing very well in Wisconsin and gonna try to start getting California going and eventually maybe Florida. But yeah, it's just exciting. Little by little. - So the concept behind Patina as a branding mechanism... How did that evolve? - To me, Patina represents age and beauty. - Mm. - And it was like, Patina might cover, let's just say a statue, but underneath it, it's still whatever it originally was.
And it's like, us as people, like, my beard is getting gray. - Patina. - Yeah. Yeah. My gray is Patina. - But the underlying beauty is still there. - Yeah! But the underlying beauty is still there! It's still me! But you know, same concept. No matter what we go through, no matter what our looks change like, we're still ourselves, right? Underneath it. - Yeah. - So that's kind of Patina and I think it applies to artifacts, but it also applies to us as human beings. - Yeah. - So, yeah.
- That's awesome. I like it. It's a lot deeper than I expected it to be. - Yeah, I know, man. - You thought about this. - Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I'm a pretty surface-level per... No, I'm just kidding. I'm not. I'm actually, unfortunately very deep. - Super deep? - Yeah. That's the problem. - And so the podcast. Tell me about your experience in podcasting and how you tripped on this. - So, one day, my bud... So I had moved down to Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a job.
That's when I was doing the commodity stuff. And I was moving back to Illinois and my buddy was like, "Hey, man. There's these things called podcasts that people are doing. We should do a cigar podcast." Now, mind you, in 2014 there wasn't... You know, podcasting was still a relatively new... So by 2015, I believe, is when we actually started it. We had planned it and all this stuff.
And so we just started talking about cigars, and then we start having retailers and brands send us cigars to review and stuff like that. We were one of the first people to do like Southern Draw and Black Label, you know, some of the first. Fratello- - The Rose of Sharon. - You know? And so this was even before... This is when Southern Draw just had the Kudzu and Firethorn, I think.
- Did you have Robert [Holt] in and talk to him about- - We didn't, no. It was just purely by mail or- - And your experiencing the cigar, and you're talking about what your experience is. - Sure. Yeah. At that time, we were just doing reviews. - Guys smoking cigars. - Yeah, and then we became the smoke... So then we meet James Brown, he does that cigar for us that we did in 2015, and it ended up being released in 2016. But the podcast was really the gateway into the world of cigars.
And, you know, the connections that we made through some of that stuff really allowed Patina to happen, I guess is what I would say. - Talking about cigars. - Talking about cigars, yeah. - James Brown, that's... We sat with him last year. - Mm-hmm. - Lovely. What a great story. And talk about a guy that's got Patina. - Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. He's got some nice patina. - Yeah, and he's, you know, really committed to art. - Absolutely. - And a design mentality. - Yep. Absolutely.
And you see it in his stuff. So yeah, man, you know, he kind of allowed us to learn a little bit more about that and then we... My cigars were originally made at a factory called Mombacho [Cigar Factory], who unfortunately is no longer around. And I'd moved to NACSA in 2019, and we've been there since, which is a wonderful factory. But yeah, the journey has been interesting, full of turns.
So... But you persevere because if you're looking at it from an outside perspective, you see the final product like you see the cigar on the shelf. Well, there was a million steps in between that cigar being tobacco and then getting on the shelf. And it's the same thing with building a cigar brand. There's a lot of stuff that people don't take into consideration or see until they're actually in it. - Have you endeavored to chronicle at all, to be able to tell the story with some depth?
I just think there's a lot of people dreaming about their futures and what they might do to make their mark on the world and how they're gonna make a living, how they're gonna build a life, feed their family and so forth. Have you had a chance to... ...keep the story together? I mean... - By and large, but not necessarily with intention.
And I think it's like anything else, when you get really caught up into something, you become tunnel vision to a certain extent because you become a task master. Like, "What do I need to get done," versus sometimes thinking about, "Wow, look at all that we have done." Like, I have people in my life that will sometimes have to remind me about how far we've come, because honestly, sometimes it feels like, "Man, why am I even... Have we even accomplished anything? What are we doing?
Is this even the right thing to be doing?" And then people are like, "Hey man, do you remember when you weren't in this store, or you had two lines and now you have five or..." So, it's good to... If you have the right people around you, I think it is easier to chronicle such a journey. because they'll remind you of some of the stuff that you forget. - And actually, opportunities like this, and we love telling other people's stories.
Our whole vibe in the industry is we're an asterisk on the industry. We do one thing really well. Each one of these people that have been a part of our journey, telling their story has been our focus. - Absolutely. - And as a compliment to that, we're tagging along. - Yeah. - You know, we're present for the story. So more conversations, more podcasts, more videos, more- - Absolutely. - You know?
- These are the opportunities that allow brands like Patina to reach people that maybe would've never otherwise heard of the brand. So what you're doing for guys like me, especially, is beyond measure in terms of how impactful it is and how much it means to me, you know? And I'm sure other guys that are in my situation. Funny story about these pictures.
So when Mike had messaged me and said, "Hey, Mo, you want to take a picture so we could do the Boveda For My Humidor?" And I told him, I said, "Let me lose a few pounds first. I wanna look a little better." (laughing) So yeah, "When I lose a couple pounds, maybe we'll get on the wall." - Yeah. Well, and that's not uncommon.
We talk to Erik Espinosa with regularity about replacing his more robust physique with a more contemporary because if you see Eric now, he's pretty ripped, and you know, he's been working with Guy Fieri and they kind of have a contest about- - Yeah, yeah. Right, right, right. - Who's more chiseled. But really delightful personalities, all with unique stories. - Absolutely.
- Passion, commitment to this industry and remarkably, all of them share some very specific traits about the way they regard others, the way they treat people, the way they approach life. - Absolutely. - It's a real privilege to tell these stories. It's a privilege to sit with you. Patina is a marvelously accessible cigar. If you're new to cigars, and you go try that... That first one I had was a Connecticut. - Yeah. Yeah. - I don't know what you call that.
- Yeah. Just a Connecticut. - Just a Connecticut. It's a really... Patina actually took me from a bias against Connecticuts to being open to Connecticuts. The Rose of Sharon, you mentioned, from Southern Draw. That was a Connecticut that captured my imagination. Some of what Carlito's done with the Arturo Fuente Connecticut is special. - Yeah. - The Oliva Connecticuts. I mean, there's things that we get taken on a journey. Patina should be a part of your journey. - Thank you.
I look forward to watching you continue to grow and succeed. We wanna be a part of it. - Oh, you guys are. Yeah. Every, every box comes with Boveda, so... - We appreciate that. - Yeah. - Thank you. We wanna continue to tell your story. - Absolutely. Thank you. - Mo Maali, just really a privilege for us. - Yeah, thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity. - Thank you. - Yeah.