MOTTOLA:<\/b>\u00a0How long has your family been in the tobacco business?
\nREYES:<\/b>\u00a0Six generations over 150 years. My family on the Reyes side comes from Spain, and my family has always been in Navarrete, and today we have fields from there to Mao. They started with a very small field in the middle of the city, and it\u2019s still there. At the beginning, we sold the tobacco that we grew. Then my great grandfather Don Julio started crossing varietals.<\/p>\n
Q:<\/b>\u00a0When did your family start making cigars?
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0In 1992.<\/p>\n
Q:<\/b>\u00a0The family never made cigars before that?
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0No. That\u2019s when De Los Reyes was born. My father worked first at the PVC Puros de Villa Gonzalez cigar factory.<\/p>\n
Q:<\/b>\u00a0Did he open his own factory?
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0Yes in Jacagua. It was called De Los Reyes and he made cigars for\u00a0Thompson\u00a0at the time. His first cigar brand was called Rey de Reyes, but someone owned [the trademark] in the U.S. so he had to sell in Europe, in Spain. He was mostly devoted to private labels. He made Indian Tabac for\u00a0Rocky [Patel].<\/p>\n
Q:<\/b>\u00a0What was the first Reyes line to come to the U.S.?
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0The Augusto Reyes brand, in 2006.<\/p>\n
Q:<\/b>\u00a0When did you start working in tobacco?
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0Twelve years ago, when I was 18. I just got back from school in Switzerland and I wanted to work. My dad didn\u2019t want me to work in tobacco so I went to human resources and applied for a job at the factory. They shifted me around. The first department I worked in was human resources. Then finance. Then inventory. Then packaging. Then I went to production. That was the toughest.<\/p>\n
Q:<\/b>\u00a0Why?
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0I\u2019d smoke a cigar and say \u201cI like it.\u201d And my father would say \u201cThat\u2019s not enough. You have to give me more of an answer.\u201d I had to relate what I liked and relate it to the tobacco, how the leaves are blended. That all affects how the cigar smokes and how it feels on the palate. It\u2019s not as easy as a primary process like packaging.<\/p>\n
Q:<\/b>\u00a0What were you learning about tobacco?
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0The primings\u2014ligeros, coronas, secos. I learned to look for differences in wrapper and binder, and how to keep them moist. I also learned about drying tobaccos before production. We don\u2019t believe in an absolute standard. Tobacco changes. If you\u2019re honest and you use just water and [cigar rolling glue]\u2014that\u2019s all you\u2019re supposed to use\u2014the tobacco is always changing. The same leaves from the same plant might give you the same stimulation, but the flavor profile can be different.<\/p>\n
Q:<\/b>\u00a0Did you learn about fermentation?
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0Later. For the first four years I was everyone\u2019s assistant running errands all the time, from 2007 to 2011. Then, I quit.<\/p>\n
Q:<\/b>\u00a0What made you decide to leave?
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0I was having health issues, but I also wanted to be outside the family business. I loved it but didn\u2019t have the freedom to create. So I applied to Grupo Popular and got a job there. I was in customer service first in the bank area, then on the investment side. I thought I would like finance, so I did that for a year. That\u2019s when my dad got involved with Swisher and not as involved in the factory anymore. He needed help and asked if I\u2019d help run the factory for him. I was unhappy at my job. I thought I would like investment. So, in 2012 I came back as a factory manager with my dad.<\/p>\n
Q:<\/b>\u00a0What did you do when you returned?
\nA:\u00a0<\/b>I asked what we did wrong.<\/p>\n
Q:<\/b>\u00a0What do you mean?
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0I saw the passion in the factory, and the brand my father made received good ratings, but we were making products for too many people. Too many SKUs. The passion and the love was being lost in translation because of the way mail-order companies handled the Augusto Reyes brand. Dad didn\u2019t know he had to price protect the brand with mail order. But once we started doing well we felt we didn\u2019t have to do that anymore. He was making 13 million cigars a year, mostly for mail order.<\/p>\n
Q:<\/b>\u00a0What did you do to address these problems?
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0We decided to cancel a lot of the mail-order cigars we were making. We gave them a year\u2019s notice and continued to make a few brands with Thompson. We stopped making mixed-fill cigars. We also took the Augusto Reyes brand off the market.<\/p>\n
Q:<\/b>\u00a0Why did you do that? Q:<\/b>\u00a0What other changes did you make? Q:<\/b>\u00a0How did you raise the standard? Q:<\/b>\u00a0So the better the roller the more money they make? Q:\u00a0<\/b>That sounds like a big change. How did the rollers like it? Q:<\/b>\u00a0You went from making 13 million cigars a year down to 1.3 million? Q:<\/b>\u00a0What did your father think about the drop in production? Q:<\/b>\u00a0How many cigars do you produce a year? Q:<\/b>\u00a0What\u2019s the percentage of your own brands verses the contract brands you produce for other people? Q:<\/b>\u00a0Are you trying to get back to the old production numbers? Q:<\/b>\u00a0Is your father completely hands-off? Q:<\/b>\u00a0What\u2019s your flagship brand? Q:<\/b>\u00a0What year did Saga come out? Q:<\/b>\u00a0Your uncle as in Leo Reyes, the grower of Dominican tobacco? Q:<\/b>\u00a0How many different tobacco types does he grow? Q:<\/b>\u00a0You changed the name of your company from Corporaci\u00f3n Cigar Export (CCE) back to De Los Reyes. Why? Q:<\/b>\u00a0How did the market respond to the Saga Short Tales? Q:<\/b>\u00a0How many volumes do you have? Q:<\/b>\u00a0What\u2019s the production for each Saga volume? Q:<\/b>\u00a0Do you think getting market share in the U.S. is difficult? Q:<\/b>\u00a0As a small company, what are your thoughts on the FDA regulations? Q:<\/b>\u00a0What would FDA regulation mean for your company? Q:<\/b>\u00a0What\u2019s it like being a female in such a male dominated industry? Q:\u00a0<\/b>But not everyone is always professional back. Q:<\/b>\u00a0As a woman, you have to maintain boundaries in a way that men in your position don\u2019t have to think about. Q:<\/b>\u00a0What do you think about the rise of Nicaragua? <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" She\u2019s only 30 years old, but Nirka Reyes is the president and driving force behind\u00a0De Los Reyes, a cigar factory in the Dominican Republic\u00a0respon\u00adsible for the Saga…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4768,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,20,24,27],"tags":[2,8,29,126,253,21,254,255],"class_list":["post-4557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cigars","category-india-cigar-club","category-luxury","category-news","tag-cigars","tag-cigar-club-of-india","tag-cigar-festival","tag-cigar-review","tag-dominican-republic","tag-india-cigar-club","tag-nirka-reyes","tag-short-tales"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/indiacigarclub.com\/journal\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/indiacigarclub.com\/journal\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/indiacigarclub.com\/journal\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indiacigarclub.com\/journal\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indiacigarclub.com\/journal\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/indiacigarclub.com\/journal\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indiacigarclub.com\/journal\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/indiacigarclub.com\/journal\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indiacigarclub.com\/journal\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indiacigarclub.com\/journal\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0I wanted to make a cigar for long-term success, cigars for brick-and-mortar. It was sad to see how it started and what it became. That\u2019s my dad\u2019s name. That\u2019s my last name. Now, I just make Augusto Reyes Nativo for my dad, but we don\u2019t sell it anymore.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/indiacigarclub.com\/journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/nirkareyes2-1600.jpg\")
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0We also downsized. That was sad too, but it was critical. He was making the Patoro brand since 2001. It was a European line. Patoro was our quality standard. I wanted all my cigars to be like that. That became the production standard for the factory.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0In the cigar world, you don\u2019t pay by skill. You pay by production quantity. I wanted to change that. I wanted everyone to roll with the same quality. Incentive changes. We don\u2019t pay for how many cigars each roller makes.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0Yes. They have a baseline on production, but the incentive they used to get for quantity is now for quality.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0Some of them left. Most of them stayed. I wasn\u2019t doing millions of cigars anymore. Maybe 1.2 or 1.3 million cigars. That was in 2013.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0Yes.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0He was very supportive. He agreed. I\u2019m always going to have a cigar factory. We put out the Don Julio brand. Swisher owned the trademark and they gave it to us, so this was named after my great grandfather to honor our past. It was a big deal to honor my past. We had two booths that year [at the trade show] in 2013 to introduce Don Julio.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0Last year, 2.2 million, including private brands.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0Thirty percent is ours. Everything else is private.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0It\u2019s a long-term plan. We hired engineers to figure out how to improve processes, improving aging techniques for example, and changes in our humidity. My brother had distribution in Miami, but we had to close it because I\u2019m not shipping millions of cigars into the U.S. Now, we ship directly to the retailer from the factory with UPS. And we pay for the shipping.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0No. Even though I manage De Los Reyes, we\u2019re still a family board, so I have to present to my dad and my brother.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0Saga. I wanted something that portrays the stories and the heritage of cigars. That\u2019s when Saga came to mind. My dad hated the name [laughs]. In Dominican slang, you call a bad baseball player \u201csaga.\u201d It\u2019s a short name and people can say it easily in any language.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0That was 2014. The Saga Golden Age came out with all Dominican tobacco. It has a Corojo 2006 Dominican wrapper, Dominican San Vicente binder and original Piloto Cubano seed tobacco in the filler. A lot of people don\u2019t use Dominican wrapper. My uncle is very big on using Dominican seeds.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0Yes. He is the most passionate person about tobacco that I know. He inspired me to change everything to improve and to always keep improving. If he didn\u2019t continue to grow the Piloto I wouldn\u2019t have Golden Age. Working with family is difficult and I had to gain his respect. I am his client now. He\u2019ll show me a seed and I know he has other customers, but I want to be first, so I have to negotiate with him.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0In Cuban seeds alone, he grows about 17 different varieties. It\u2019s a privilege to use wrappers grown in the same fields that my great grandfather grew tobacco on. It gives me the continuity of six generations and it\u2019s an important connection. I never travel during tobacco season and I\u2019m sad when it\u2019s over. That connection makes all the difference. I know on what exact field the tobaccos come from and I know how my uncle processes the tobacco. When I buy from other growers, I have to do my own processing of the tobacco.<\/p>\n
\nA:\u00a0<\/b>I never liked the name. We\u2019re changing what we are as a factory and as a team. I didn\u2019t like the logo either. My dad bought the free zone with that name and he just stayed with it. I remember our original factory in Jacagua. It wasn\u2019t fancy at all, but it was beautiful. I wanted that feeling so I went back to the first name. That was in 2015. I used the crown for the logo which was taken from my family\u2019s crest.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/indiacigarclub.com\/journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/sagabook-1600.jpg\")
Q:<\/b>\u00a0Let\u2019s talk about the Saga Short Tales brand.
\nA:\u00a0<\/b>Sagas are big stories. But then there are little stories. We wanted to make something unique, so we decided to make the box look like a book. The first volume of Saga Short Tales is called Tales of the High Primings. It came out in 2016 and we needed a strong cigar to kill the myth that we don\u2019t make powerful cigars in the Dominican Republic. I went back to the high primings because of its power. For us, strength means that you feel it in your body, but there is still plenty of stimulation on the palate, so that you still detect the sweetness.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0That\u2019s been our game changer. They love the book. It sold out fast because people wanted to buy the full box. After they bought the first one, they want the collection. We\u2019re trying to have every profile. We haven\u2019t done a mild one yet. Not sure if we\u2019re going to do that.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0We\u2019re up to six now. We plan on 10. Each one is a different blend and different size. A different story.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0We start with 50,000 cigars. If inventories get down to a certain level, we start production again.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0It is. You look around and there\u2019s a new factory opening up every day. You\u2019d think that with the FDA people would be scared, but apparently not. So many lines come out every year. And bigger companies have strategies to take up shelf space.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0It feels like a very intentional thing, like they want us to be the generation that ends tobacco smoking. Not all tobacco products are the same. Cigarettes and smokeless tobacco are so different from cigars. They\u2019re trying to regulate something that can never have one standard. It\u2019s impossible. Are we going to chemically engineer a leaf so that every leaf gives the same amount of nicotine? It\u2019s an attack on our culture, and they\u2019re not trying to understand it. I accept that businesses have to be regulated, but we should have some air.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0Some products would be safe because we have predicate brands, but it\u2019s going to limit creativity. What can I do to make a substantial equivalent? It will be playing chess with the government.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0It was a challenge because of my youth more than because I was a female. That was the most challenging part. It took time to get respect from peers and the retailers. Even the consumers. Women can enjoy cigars in the same way that men can enjoy cigars. That is something I wanted to communicate. I don\u2019t party. I don\u2019t drink at cigar events. Keep the vibe professional.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0Someone wanted me to do a cigar event, and asked if I could come in a miniskirt. I usually don\u2019t wear short dresses. Sometimes I get indecent proposals, but I ignore them.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/b>\u00a0Yes. One time at the IPCPR trade show, someone told me to sit on his lap. It\u2019s getting better. When you go to a cigar event, still most of the women are models in short dresses. Things are changing.<\/p>\n
\nA:\u00a0<\/b>The world is very competitive, and it\u2019s a great motivation. Just like when people ask me what happens if Cubans become legal in the U.S. It\u2019s another challenge and it will be fun. I don\u2019t like things to be too easy. There\u2019s a market for everyone. Not every consumer likes the same thing. It\u2019s good for Nicaragua. Estel\u00ed was nothing and undeveloped. Now, I see how many factories they have. That\u2019s a good thing. It\u2019s extraordinary.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n