Not Just Blowing Smoke
When Oscar Boruchin came to Miami from Havana in 1961, he drove a cab to support his family; one day, he accepted a box of cigars in lieu of a fare, resold the cigars, and a career was born. After owning and operating cigar stands, working for General Cigar and Mike's Cigars, he bought Mike's in 1985. Now 63, the soft-spoken, courtly Boruchin has built Mike's into the country's largest retail/wholesale cigar distributor, selling nearly 50 million cigars a year to a clientele that includes Jack Nicholson, Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone. Last year, Mike's had gross sales of $22 million, providing cigars to 6,000 retail outlets and 50,000 customers worldwide. Florida Trend spoke with him about the cigar business:
FT: Any signs that the cigar craze is burning out?
Last year we doubled our business. It's impossible to double your business every year, but we're showing a very healthy increase this year - about 70% for the first four months. At the rate we're going, we'll do about $35 million.
I don't think it's a fad. It's a lot of young people coming in. They're not like the oldtimers who smoked cigars all day; they may smoke four or five cigars a week. Cigars have become like a good wine. Young people have in front of them 50-60 years of smoking, and even if not everybody continues to smoke, it's going to be a tremendous industry.
FT: Break down the price of a $7 cigar at a local tobacco shop.
Don't pay $7 for a cigar. This is one of the things that's going to hurt the industry. There are hundreds of new factories and people coming into the market in the last two years selling at tremendous markups. The regular price of a good Macanudo or Partagas should still be around $5. The retailer is making an outrageous profit if he's selling for more than about $5.
FT: There's always a debate among cigar smokers about whether Cuban cigars are "as good as they used to be." What do you think?
My perspective is that Cuban cigars are the best in the world. It's possible that some little percentage is not as good as it was, but you have to be very ignorant to say Cuban cigars are not the best. It's a matter of geography - the climate, the rainfall, the humidity in western Cuba. You can't duplicate that.
But the fact that they're still the best doesn't hide the fact that they're illegal. We are involved right now with U.S. Customs in order to stop the importation of Cuban cigars and counterfeit cigars. There's a tremendous loss of revenue because there are no taxes paid, of course. Customs finally got very interested.
FT: Are there a lot of counterfeit Cuban cigars?
I would say about half the people buying Cuban cigars are buying counterfeit cigars. They look the same, the bands are the same, but the cigars are garbage. Some are from Honduras, most are from the Do
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Build Your Own
A south Florida builder is offering its customers the opportunity to edit themselves into the home of their dreams via computer. Westbrooke Communities developed software, called Design Wizard, which is loaded with eight basic models that homebuyers can alter based on their preferences. As extra bedrooms become home offices or kitchens grow, the price of the customized home pops up onscreen. The $500,000 program - developed with help from a Seattle-based company, Asymetrix - even produces construction drawings and blueprints. Next? A 3-D virtual reality program that will let buyers not only design the home, but also walk around inside.
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Swelled Heads
She's done everything from oversized heads of Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics to giant sandwiches for Sunbeam Bakery. Pensacola's Judy Eggart is a former model and legal secretary who now makes her living designing and building foam-rubber structures that corporations use for promotional work and ad campaigns. She calls her company Off the Wall Costume Design. Her biggest order for one character: 20 "Noids" for Domino's Pizza of Florida and Alabama. The most appreciated? Caricatures of executives at a corporation in Jacksonville. The company hired gymnasts to breakdance while wearing the heads at the firm's annual party. Foam-rubber fun isn't cheap, however,