Tobacco Business

[ T O B A C C O B U S I N E S S . C O M ] TOBACCO BUSINESS [ 67 ] he’s experienced so far shows that, for entrepreneurs, there’s often no better teacher than life itself. Life’s Lessons Desind was born in Manhattan, New York. His family moved after his father, a hat manufacturer and one of the biggest mentors of Desind’s life, moved his factory to Allentown, Pennsylvania. His family spent the next few years going back and forth between New York and Pennsylvania. This “double life“ led to what Desind views as one of his special abilities. “We were always going back and forth, not during school and stuff, but [during] any holiday, we were back in New York,” he says. “That created a bit of a superpower that is something of a superpower for me. I feel like everyone has a superpower or a strength. That strength for me is seeing things from different perspectives.” Desind developed his superpower even further following the divorce of his parents. While his father remained on what Desind considered to be the better part of town, his mother moved to a poorer area. Just as Desind had grown up seeing the different lifestyles of those who lived in New York versus Pennsylvania, he suddenly began to see how socially and economically diverse the world was as well. This allowed Desind to pick up on trends early on and to make friends with people from all walks of life—two abilities that he’d use later on in life—once he got involved in the cigar industry. Desind’s childhood was far from ideal. Following his parents’ divorce, he spent much of his teen years in the streets of Allentown and getting into trouble, which contributed to his already different perspective on life and community. One thing remained constant in his life through his early 30s—his love of music. Desind was a singer and songwriter and started out as a rapper, long before Eminem made it big. Music producer Scott Storch helped Desind with his demo tape, and in turn Desind served as an unofficial assistant to Storch while they were in the studio. “Music was my entire life,” Desind says. “I dedicated absolutely everything—every ounce of my passion and being—to music. As I got older, after Eminem came out, I realized [that] being a white rapper wasn’t going to be so easy. I started to learn how to sing, and so over time, I actually became quite a good singer. The biggest problem was that I was really more of a writer, even though I was trying to build myself as an artist. One song to the next would sound totally different. Just like how a cigar brand should have some consistency, so should an artist. An artist needs to have their sound, a brand needs to have its flavor, and I developed that sound a bit too late. It just turned into an unhealthy lifestyle that I eventually had to get out of.” As Desind worked on his music career, he also worked in sales. Desind worked for many different companies—high-end Wall Street businesses, New York City financial firms, mortgage banks, commercial mortgage banks and retail. If it was a sales-related job, Desind probably worked it at some point but only for an average of two weeks to six months, at most. Even though he was, in his words, not the greatest employee, he learned a lot about sales with the help of his uncle, who worked for a large financial firm and encouraged Desind to take a sales course that all of his firm’s employees went through. The course helped give Desind’s approach to sales more structure, so instead of losing deals, he suddenly started to close them. While he continued to work on his sales career, Desind felt disillusioned with the music industry, leading him to make the decision to give up his dreams of being a music artist. He resented the time he felt he had wasted pursuing a music career and moved to Miami, where he knew that he wanted to eventually start a business of his own—but he had no idea what it would be. He began working for an auto transport company and was surprised by how the industry operated, with promises being made to customers that were often broken without any apology. Desind was inspired to get his own broker’s license, which allowed him to start his own auto transport operation, and he used the skills he had learned as a music artist, such as leveraging video and websites, to put his own stamp on the industry that he viewed as flawed and ready for something different. “I made it very clear that we were not a trucking company but that we were a broker, and that every single [trucking] company that calls you is the same exact thing, so beware of people promising you things that they can’t keep and people telling you that they’re a transport company,” he says. “Over time, I kept drilling this into consumers’ heads. Eventually, other people started working it into their pitches— that we were all brokers—so I had an impact on that business. It’s a very, very, very stressful business, and no one leaves happy. Everyone is disappointed: The car never shows up on time, sometimes drivers disappear for weeks or don’t answer their phone, and they don’t tell you where the car is. It’s an absolute nightmare.” As had occurred throughout his life, Desind used what he learned from his auto transport business to help launch another business. This time, however, it was one that focused on cigars. When Desind was about 35 years old, he decided that his love for sneakers felt a bit immature, but he wanted to transfer that sneakerhead-collecting energy into something new. Desind was living in Tampa at the time, a city known for its strong cigar culture. Because he owned his own business, Desind was able to work from wherever he wanted and chose Tampa Humidor as a workplace. While there, he was shown a series of limited edition cigars that included the 2014 Las Calaveras and Tatuaje Monster. Suddenly, he had a new obsession and began amassing a huge collection of limited cigars. It didn’t take long before his collection filled an entire room with rare cigars from floor to ceiling. When he and his wife decided to move to Los Angeles, Desind was suddenly faced with the realization that he wouldn’t be able to take his cigar collection with him. “So I said, ’OK, I guess I gotta sell some of this stuff.’ I went to sell these cigars, and I realized that no one understood the collectible cigar game—it just hadn’t come to fruition yet. I went to try to sell these cigars, and people were lowballing me on things that I had aged for four or five years. It was disheartening, to say the least,” he explains. “The idea that I got was that cigars are not taken seriously, not as a craft, not as an artisan product, and so I said to myself, ‘If I’m going to sell these things at a discount, I’m going to make sure these people know what they’re getting.’ So I created a subscription business. I would put the cigars in a box, and I would write about each cigar. Each month, I sold three cigars with a writeup on each one: the story