ITALO DOMINICAN CIGAR FACTORY:
from the idea to the international contracts
Like many of the best history of the human being, the idea was born among a group of friends and relatives who have joined the common passion for tobacco and have decided, in an afternoon of the year 2018, sitting at a table smoking a cigar, just for fun, to set up a small factory for the production of cigars for sale to the local public. The road ahead of us turned out to be more complicated than we expected, despite the fact that our initial group already included professionals with a network of important knowledge in the tobacco sector and that some of them were Dominican nationals.
However, in a short time and with great determination and tenacity, our team knew how to pack a well-made cigar from the basic green leaf, creating a blend that initially met our needs and those of our first local customers. In 2020, however, the meeting with the Dominican Master Blender Martin Cornelio profoundly changed the perspective of our expectations and we realized that, in the future, we could aim much higher if we had taken the correct decisions.
The Master really liked our ideas and our vision of the future, so from that moment Cornelio has always been a consultant integrated into our technical and administrative system that helps us improve day by day. We have had the pleasure of manufacturing cigars ordered by very important, small and medium-sized companies, prominent personalities from the world of sports or even simple private individuals who wanted a personalized product based on their personal needs and tastes. This step, which initially emphasized less the specific product of our brand, in the final analysis was the catalytic process that was able to definitively form the know-how for Italo Dominican Cigar Factory and give us all the notions, knowledge and strength that today put us in a position to be able to offer to the international market a cigar with unique organoleptic characteristics and that it is the result of the experience acquired in these years of work and in addition to research and development.
ONCE UPON A TIME...
Do coincidences exist?
Italo Dominican Cigar Factory was born mainly around the commitment and determination of two great families, one Italian and the other Dominican, who together gave birth to something extraordinary and new, that no matter how deep in our souls we felt as something that already belonged to us. A bit like when you play a musical instrument for the first time or do a job that you don't know how to do but it turns out well, in a few words we felt that we had the vein for tobacco.
At first we did not pay much attention to these sensations, we thought that the perfect understanding between each member of our team was the result of enthusiasm, but then we realized some details of our lives - and more precisely of our past - than of some In a way, they incredibly linked all the members of our initial group. Our link with the world of tobacco is born from the depths of our past, from our grandparents and great-grandparents, who despite being thousands of miles away, without knowing each other and having lived in different parts of the world with different cultures, tasted the cigar in almost the same way.
Grandfather Giovanni, a carpinter by profession and originally from southern Italy, was a great enthusiast and connoisseur of cigars, he loved to smoke his cigar while working or riding a horse. His second passion, gardening, even led him to grow some tobacco leaves when he was younger, but he never had the opportunity to turn his passion into a business. We grandchildren did not like the smell of smoke very much, but he, with his always bright smile and his cigar between his lips, told us amazing stories about his youth, about the war that lived on his skin, about his travels and about the core values that life taught him.
Then there is Uncle Ferdinando (now everyone calls him "Uncle") who, like Grandpa Giovanni, is the protagonist of similar events that have led everyone around him to associate him inextricably with the image of the Dominican cigar. Countless are the real life stories that Uncle Ferdinando told his children and grandchildren, some of which were so attractive and so adventurous that they were almost unbelievable, in addition to telling them in such a captivating way that he always knew how to enchant even the adults. Ferdinando is one of those men who come from the old school, with an integrity built on solid moral principles, a person with a story behind him worthy of a movie, especially for the parts that he has not yet told us... and by the way, there are still many.
Who knows if coincidences exist or not, if the future is written or if we are all unconscious pawns in a casual game, whatever the answer is it does not matter. What matters is that now we are here to combine our passion for tobacco... and we have quite taken a liking to it.