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Inside Jay Z's Cohiba Comador Cigar Venture

This article is more than 9 years old.

Stroll into the Nat Sherman Townhouse in Manhattan and the first thing you’ll notice is how quickly the scent of smoke engulfs your body, attaching itself to the back of your throat like a bitter, invisible paste. In the rare instance that none of the sales associates or patrons is actively puffing, the aroma still pervades the store as if baked into the faded rugs and set for timed release.

Other attention-grabbing details include the sheer quantity of cigars—thousands of individual sticks produced by hundreds of different brands—and the signs hanging overhead, adorned with old-style cursive script. They proclaim the virtues of Nat Sherman’s wares: “100% Additive Free,” “The Original Natural,” “The Finest.”

Yet nowhere among the townhouse’s shelves can one find the Cohiba Comador, a cigar launched by Jay Z last year. It’s probably because he and the brass at Virginia-based General Cigar, his partner in the venture, wanted it that way.

“It’s all about how many [cigars] they come out with, how many boxes they came out with, and that’s why it becomes a little rarer to find,” says Juan Sanchez, a lead sales associate at Nat Sherman. “They do market it as a boutique line.”

Full coverage: Hip-Hop's Wealthiest Artists 2014

The Cohiba Comador is available only at a handful of retailers across the U.S., including Club Macanudo and Jay Z’s 40/40 Club in New York, as well as online. And it’s got a price point to match: $210 for a regular pack of seven cigars, $350 for seven in a Spanish cedar-lined travel humidor and $999 for 21 of them in a pebbled-leather humidor.

The production run for the humidor packages is accordingly small—350 for the leather edition and 2,000 for the travel humidor—which means a maximum of about $1 million in retail sales. As for loose cigars, a typical limited run for General Cigar consists of anywhere from 10 to 3,000 boxes, with 20-25 cigars in each.

“It’s not for everybody,” says Dan Carr, chief of General Cigar, of Comador. “It’s for the people with very discerning taste who enjoy cigars. This is considered a very limited run.”

Carr wouldn’t confirm the exact number of boxes produced, but even the maximum of 3,000 would translate to just 21,000 Comadors. Still, the margins should be excellent. According to one industry source, high-end cigars cost about $2 to make at the point of manufacture and can be sold at $10-$15 wholesale.

Each Comador cigar is handcrafted in the Dominican Republic and carrys a flavor its purveyors describe as having “nuances of wood and notes of spice.” That’s probably not how Jay Z would describe it, though.

"He’s not a guy that tells you it’s got hints of chocolate," says Carr. “That's not him. ... He told us, straight up, he knows what he likes, and he knows it when he sees it."

Jay Z and Carr started discussing a collaboration more than two years ago after meeting through mutual acquaintances. They were able to settle on a joint-venture structure wherein Jay Z owns the Comador trademark. (“This isn’t a licensing agreement or anything,” says Carr. “Jay has been involved in every detail.”)

The process of creating the cigar begins with the seed, a strain that came over to the U.S. from Cuba in the 18th Century. The plants are now grown on a 25-acre plot of land in Connecticut near the Farmington River. The best tobacco leaves are selected and aged in Dominican rum barrels; master cigar makers then handcraft each one.

“When you watch us go through it all, you’d think we should probably be charging more than we are,” says Carr. “It’s a wonderful cigar.”

Be that as it may, there are plenty of other cigars in that price range—and cheaper—that aficionados would characterize similarly. That’s at least part of the reason why Comador can’t be found on the shelves of establishments like the Nat Sherman townhouse.

“Their price points are a little higher for something that we have over and over in our humidor, in terms of genetic makeup,” says Sanchez. “…We have a lot of cigars that have the same composition without being that price point, and that’s the reason we don’t carry it.”

Observers have made similar statements about Jay Z’s other high-end products, some in very unflattering terms. For example, though his $300-per-bottle Armand de Brignac champagne has received high marks in certain taste tests, one industry insider, Lyle Fass, dubbed it “the biggest rip-off in the history of wine.” (For more, see my Jay Z biography Empire State of Mind).

Comador, however, doesn’t seem to have garnered much negative press. For that matter, the cigar hasn’t received much press of any kind in the months following its much ballyhooed rollout late last year.

Whether that’s a result of the cigar’s merit or just its dearth of availability remains to be seen. Either way, the venture makes up a matchstick-thin fraction of Jay Z's $520 net worth, and that state of affairs doesn't appear set to change anytime soon.

But Nat Sherman’s Sanchez, for one, thinks the Comador is off to a fine start—even if his store doesn’t carry it. Asked if he thinks it’s doing as well as General Cigar and Jay Z might have hoped, his response was emphatic: “Absolutely. Hands down, yes.”

For more about the business of music, check out my Jay Z biography, Empire State of Mind; my next, Michael Jackson, Inc, will be published in June. You can also follow me on Twitter and Facebook.