Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Darnell Streat. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Darnell, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?

We started our cigar business in September of 2017. My partners and I were industry outsiders to the cigar business so we didn’t have any direct connections on how to get started in the business. So we used our corporate experience to devise a business and marketing plan. So we set a goal to sell 10k cigars in our first year of operations. In order for us to be successful we needed to expose the public to our product. So decided each of the partners would go to their local cigar shops and ask customers have they heard of a small boutique cigar company called Emperors Cut cigars. As you would expect no one had heard of our company. We used that customer interaction to talk about our cigar. We also gave each person a cigar and told them where they could purchase more cigars. Over several weeks we would engage cigar smokers across the country and provide them with a sample of our product without letting them know we were the owners of the company. Over time people started talking about a new cigar on the market made by a group of friends that loved to smoke cigars. From that exposure we started traveling around the country selling our cigars at biker rallies, wine events, golf events, and personal parties.

After three months of pushing our product directly with consumers we started contacting retails stores to take advantage of their large customer base. In thirty days we signed up 31 retails cigar shops to carrier our product. Over the next three months we had added an additional 33 stores to our customer base. At various times in this process we had cigar shops calling us so they could carry our product. This was made possible because we would tell customers to ask for the product at their cigar shop. We knew if enough people asked for the product sooner or later the retail owners would want to carry the cigars.

Over the next twelve months we growth our product foot print from zero cigar shops to 105 locations in 14 states. Instead of selling 10k cigars we sold around 24k cigars in our first year of operation. We achieved this growth by being very tactical in our sales approach along with setting financial targets that would grow revenue and build a large customer base over time. In order to get high growth we sacrificed a lot of time and money. The team spent a lot of time on the road promoting the cigar and using personal money to fund travel while waiting on customer invoices to be paid. Some times we would loss money by investing in the wrong cigar events.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I got into the cigar industry as a entrepreneur looking to use my corporate experience to build a successful brand that the average cigar enthusiast would connect to on price and value. My approach to marketing to various communities would fill the gap where the major companies have negated. I wanted to create a cigar the average person would smoke and love because they were able to connect to the brand in a way that made them feel like a owner in the company.

I have over 29 years of business experience in supply chain and international business. I hold a degree in business from Norfolk State University along with an MBA from Hampton University. I have traveled around the world on business and leisure smoking cigars with average people in various countries sharing our love of cigars and culture.

What sets our business approach apart from the major cigar brands is our ability to walk among the people and communicate our vision for the cigar brand in small groups settings. We enjoy smoking and talking with our customers because we consider them family. As a small business we don’t have the capital to develop million dollar ad campaigns via large media outlets. So we have to take the next approach and build a tiered marketing strategy that involves social media, podcast, in person meetings with small groups, and just sharing our story with the general public at cigar events.

How’d you meet your business partner?

I sat in my backyard one afternoon and sent out e-mails to 15 of my closest friends letting them know I wanted to start a cigar business. In that e-mail I asked if they wanted to invest in the business and go on a new journey that would change the cigar industry overtime. Out of the 15 friends I only heard back from 3 people. I thought that was a little disappointing, but what the Hell, So I had 3 friends accept the offer to start the cigar business. So we launched the company with the founding members in 2017. As we started the process of formulating the company and identifying the type of cigars we wanted to process we add 3 more partners over the following 12 months. Every partner has a core skillset along with their investment in order to quality as a partner. Each partner is responsible for a sector of the business like Marketing, Supply Chain, Sales, Business Development, Legal, Quality, Manufacturing, accounting, Product design, social media, and contract negotiations. Each partner participates in selling our product daily.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

We have been effective at growing our business through direct marketing, trade shows, and social media. In the cigar business direct customer contact is the most effective way to sell our product. Since cigars are a controlled product we are not allowed to use direct marketing to the public. So we spend a lot of time participating in cigar events at cigar shop. Secondly, we use social media to connect with our customers and share with them events we plan to participate in.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.emperors-cut.com
• Instagram: emperorscutcigars
• Facebook: Emperors Cut cigars