78 TOBACCO BUSINESS | MARCH / APRIL | 22 Stand up straight. Don’t slouch. Always say thank you. Return phone calls. Never be in debt to anyone. Growing up, our parents hold us accountable and embed within us these lessons aimed at making us better human beings. All of these lessons come down to a very simple overriding lesson: Do the right thing. This year, Sanj Patel is celebrating his 30th year as a tobacconist. Since he was a child, Patel’s family owned several cigar shops and operated two of the largest cigar retail outlets in the state of New Jersey. In his early teen years, Patel began working in these stores—for no pay—because it was expected that he’d help out with the family business in any way that was needed. These early experiences set him up for his long career in retail and also started his love affair with cigars. “We had other things too in the stores, but we were mainly a cigar shop,” says Patel. “I was always amazed by the type of clientele that came in. They wouldn’t question the pricing; they wouldn’t question anything! They bought a box of Te-Amos; they bought a box and Dunhill; Royal Jamaica was big back in the day. I was always fascinated by that kind of clientele and the quality of people back in the day that used to buy cigars.” Patel’s curiosity surrounding cigars began to grow the more he worked in his family’s store. One day, he took some cigars from the store to school with him and smoked them with friends. All of them got sick from the cigars and inexperience with smoking, which earned Patel a smack across his face and lecture from his uncle. Patel was punished not so much for smoking but for not relying on his family to answer the questions he had about the products they sold and choosing to learn on his own instead—an early lesson that would stay with Patel for the rest of his lifetime. Needless to say, Patel did learn how to properly smoke and appreciate cigars with the help of his family. As he got older, his interests and passion took him outside of the cigar business. For a time, Patel was a signed model with Benetton, a popular fashion brand of the 1980s. Patel made a lot of money with Benetton, which allowed him to indulge in his other passion, cars. He collected antique Corvettes and would often race cars. One race ended poorly, landing Patel in the hospital in a coma for four days. He suffered from amnesia, and it took him two years to recover. While he was still well off, he wanted to work and found himself coming back to tobacco retail as a way to push and motivate himself to move forward with his life rather than embrace the title and mentality of being disabled. Patel purchased his own building, knowing that to run a proper cigar store he’d need to do so without having to put up with the rules and stipulations set by a landlord. Sanj’s Smoke Shop opened its doors in Bloomfield, New Jersey, in 1992, just as the famed Cigar Boom was taking shape. Things have changed over the past 30 years Patel has been in business. By 1997, Patel saw that out of all the different products his store was offering, it was cigars that really carried the store. With that discovery, Sanj’s Smoke Shop became a store that specialized in boutique cigar brands, and Patel helped bring in some now well-known cigar brands to New Jersey cigar smokers. Jersey’s “Most Hated” Retailer After three decades in business, Patel acknowledges that there have been tough times, but he refuses to refer to any of these moments in his business as challenges. Trying to do the right thing has been his primary concern over the years, something that is hard to achieve at times due to the changes sweeping through the cigar industry and how differently business is conducted today compared to when he first opened the doors to his business back in the early 1990s. S Inspired by what he views as the flaws of today’s cigar industry, retailer Sanj Patel set out to release his own cigar, SP1014, to show the industry how a product and business should be handled correctly.
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