SS: Okay, I want to ask you about some of the cigars you have here. You have how many different lines of cigars?

EPC: Well, we have La Gloria Cubana, La Hoja Selecta, El Rico Habano, and Dos Gonzalez.

SS: Now, there's another cigar that's listed on the price list...

EPC: Los Statos Deluxe

SS: Yeah. Is that a name that you just hold, have you made that cigar? Are you ever going to make it?

EPC: We made it off and on, just to keep the name, but we haven't really marketed it.

SS: Which of your different lines is your personal favorite? Or do you like different cigars in different ranges?

EPC: I like different cigars in different... I like the Hoja Selecta in the morning, I like the La Gloria after lunch or something. And usually the El Rico Habano at night, before I go to bed.

SS: So during the day you just smoke the mild...

EPC: Well, you know I have to smoke everything during the day, more or less, because I keep trying as many cigars as I can from new cigar makers.

SS: Do you have any preferred sizes that you like the best?

EPC: I like the Gran Coronas, in El Rico Habano, the Habano Club, Palais Royals, I like the Double Corona La Gloria.

SS: How many cigars do you smoke in an average day?

EPC: Smoke? I smoke about three.

SS: And taste, just to check?

EPC: Taste? It varies, but you know anywhere from, I don't know, four, eight, sometimes twelve.

SS: Something I notice when I come down here to Little Havana and sometimes very unpopular everywhere else at least in the US, everyone uses cutters to clip their cigars, but I notice that most of the men and women here tend to just bite.

EPC: Yeah. They bite the tip off.

SS: I notice that when I go in the back and watch them rolling the pyramids and maybe the torpedoes also, they use paper molds for those, correct? Or do they have...

EPC: No, they use wood molds.

SS: They do? I always see them using a cone of paper.

EPC: What that is - is when they take them out of the mold, they put them in the paper for it to keep the shape. They have certain amount of molds. They make two hundred and they have like fifty molds and they put fifty in paper.

SS: Just to keep it in the same shape until they have the chance to roll the wrapper on to it. One of the things that I love when I get a bundle of cigars from you guys, is that I get a package that's stamped with "colorado wrappers." I think those are my absolute favorites, but you never have them on the price list, and I've never seen them in stores...

EPC: No, because the wrapper that we buy, there's a market from Ecuador, you have to buy everything from the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth plant. So if you start putting colors in the cigar, that's why sometimes there'll be a lighter color, other times a little bit darker. You can't really have one color all the time because it doesn't produce that much colorado. There is very little.

SS: Are you having any difficulty getting tobacco?

EPC: It's getting difficult, yeah. So you have to buy pretty much everything you can get from the people we buy from. Which brings some colorado, bring some natural, but always from the same farm and same processors.

SS: Pretty much the same tastes too?

EPC: Right, right.

SS: Now, you just opened a factory in the Dominican Republic and from everything I read and hear, it sounds like it's going very well. Are you hoping to produces six million cigars there this year?

EPC: This year, yes.

SS: And how many next year?

EPC: Well next year, I think if we can get enough tobacco bought we can pull anywhere from probably eight to ten. Right now we're kind of limiting the hiring of people. There's a lot of people that want to work for us now. And we're kind of limiting the amount of people we have in there just so we won't, we'll have enough tobacco for the ones we have.

SS: The cigars that you make here, you're selling from the store. Do the retailers also get cigars from here?

EPC: No, no.

SS: They come in from the Dominican Republic?

EPC: Right.

SS: I notice that when I get some they don't have a Dominican tax stamp on them, they just have the "Made in the Dominican Republic." So I assume that you're boxing and bundling them here....

EPC: No, Dominican Republic.

SS: They do it there in the Dominican? Now that you have six million being made there and 1.2 million being made here, how many days a month on average do you spend down in the DR?

EPC: I spend about twenty days.

SS: Does that mean you're going to move your family, maybe to the DR, since you have to spend so much time there?

EPC: No, no, they're going to stay here. My wife runs the business here, mostly the store, she has to stay here.

SS: Obviously in today's market there's all sorts of "limited edition/vintage this," "super premium," and "anniversary" type cigars, do you have any plan on adding something like that to your line?

EPC: I was planning on adding something, because I have some very good Habano seed wrapper from Nicaragua, that I want to do something with, but right now we have enough problems meeting the demand for what we have. I can't see the reason to add on another brand or whatever.

SS: How many cigars could you sell today if you had them on hand?

EPC: I figure about, minimum, anywhere from twelve to sixteen million.

SS: That's amazing. It's a big time operation - twelve to sixteen million cigars.

EPC: That's a lot of cigars.

SS: The popularity is evident for these smokes, I come here and sometimes the line goes on forever. What's the longest you've ever seen the line out the door? How far has it ever been?

EPC: The longest was, without kidding you, there was a line running from about the door and was literally running around to the corner.

SS: It would take all day to get in here! <laugh>

EPC: I don't know what happened that day. I think they had some big football game over here.

SS: For the Orange Bowl?

EPC: Right. That was incredible.

SS: In addition to regular smokers like myself willing to stand in line, I know you get a lot of celebrities that come through the door. I see plenty of autographed pictures. Who are some of the more memorable celebrities that have made the trip to El Credito?

EPC: The most, I think like Sharon Stone, Arnold Schwarzenneger was here, I wasn't here that day, but Alec Baldwin, he and his brother came here....

SS: They are very popular smokes. Do you have any idea how much cigars sell for on the West Coast?

EPC: Yeah, they told me. I've seen prices of what they sell for.

SS: I personally have seen LGC torpedoes selling for as much as twenty-three, twenty-four dollars each. Your pricing isn't like that at all, is it?

EPC: No, the torpedo now is $6.50.

SS: But still there's a wholesale price so the retailers who are getting them are actually getting them for less.

EPC: Right. Well, some of them, what they're doing, they're buying enough; we have a lot of people that come and buy the cigars, they buy them here and they're reselling. There's one guy from California, he has ten - fifteen people that come every week.

SS: That's what I was going to ask you about. Do you try to control those people from coming in?

EPC: We've limited it to two - three bundles each. If we start to see that person come in two to three times a week, we won't sell to them. But they always find somebody else.

PART 1 | PART 2 of 3 | PART 3