74 TOBACCO BUSINESS | JULY / AUGUST | 22 Has your father ever sharedwith youwhat it was like to start a new company and a cigar brand during the Cigar Boom of the 1990s? You have to realize that back then things weren’t like they are today. Today, you see new brands all the time, which is a good thing at the end of the day. It means the industry is healthy and people want to be a part of it. Back then, it was only generational companies, so companies had been around a long time [and] passed down. No newcomers. To come down here and open a factory during that time was actually considered to be totally nuts. La Flor Dominicana was a crazy idea. It really should have never happened. When my dad’s got a vision, he’s very hardheaded. He’ll kick the door down; he’s going headfirst. He’s got to do what needs to happen. So it was not easy. Being in the Cigar Boom ended up being great timing because there was such a shortage of cigars that a small, unknown company actually got a shot. Where did the company’s name come from? La Flor Dominicana?Well, so it’s kind of a saying. “flor” means flower. “la flor” is “the flower,” but to say that something is “la flor” of something means that it’s the best of that thing. So, La Flor Dominicanawould roughly translate to “the best of Dominican Republic.” La Flor Dominicana will celebrate its 26th anniversary this year. What do you attribute your company’s longevity and success to? Dude, there’s no secret about doing things correctly. It’s about not taking shortcuts. What makes La Flor Dominicana unique is that we really do control the entire process behind what we make. We own our own farm, and we operate our own farm. We own our own factory, we operate our own factory, and we’re present. Everything you see in La Flor Dominicana is real—there’s no bullshit here. Talk a bit more about the importance of being vertically integrated and how that has contributed to La Flor Dominicana’s success. It’s everything. As I said before, themore control you have over your product, the better.Wewould rather not have to rely on anybody for the quality of our products, so it’s been crucial to us to be vertically integrated. Do you consider La Flor Dominicana to be a boutique brand? Boutique is arbitrary, so I don’t know what the exact definition would be. Everybody kind of has their own definition of boutique. I like to think that we are a boutique-style manufacturer. I define boutique more as the way you’re doing things, not so much the exact numbers you are producing but how you’re making money and the quality steps that you’re taking and things like that. We’re much smaller than people perceive us to be, which is a position that we want to be in. That’s by design. People think La Flor [Dominicana] is a lot bigger than it actually is, but we’re not; there are much bigger factories and companies than us in the [Dominican Republic] and Nicaragua. How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your business? COVID’s been challenging. We had to close our factory in the beginning for a good month and a half, and then after that, we were operating at about 50percent capacity for over a year because we had to space everybody out in the factory. All the while, there seemed to be a boom happening in cigars, and demand is actually going up. So production is way down, demand is way up—you see how that could cause a lot of issues. Once we are ready to get back to 100 percent, the same staffing problems that we’ve seen around the world we’ve had here too. It was hard to find rollers; we had to train new rollers. That takes a fair amount of time. So yeah, COVID caused a lot of problems, and we’re still dealing with them. We’re back to 100 percent, but there’s a lot of catching up to do. It’s good that there’s a demand though. What types of retail partners does La Flor Dominicana set out to work with? When it comes to, for example, the U.S. market, we handle our own distribution. We look for real tobacconists. We look for people who have Antonio “Tony” Gomez (right) with his father, Litto Gomez, at the 2022 Procigar Festival in the Dominican Republic.
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