Behind the Leaf ANTO MAHROUKIAN STEERING JM TOBACCO AND ELEVATING ESPAÑOLA CIGARS

By Randy Mastronicola

SPEND FIVE MINUTES WITH ANTO MAHROUKIAN, CEO of JM Brands, Inc., and you understand that, more than just a business, cigars are the language he and his father have spoken for decades. Today, Anto is steering the family business into an elevated era with Española Cigars while remaining grounded in the values that built it.

Randy Mastronicola: We’re familiar with your premium cigarsand the popular JMs. Can you share a bit of the backstory behind them?

Anto Mahroukian: I always like to start it off with our origin story. It started on my father’s 45th birthday. My dad had recently given up smoking cigarettes and picked up cigars. I got him two premium cigars, good Connecticuts. He smoked them, loved them, and immediately asked, “Where’d you get these? Buy me a box.” I was 17 at the time. I told him, “They’re fifteen, twenty dollars each. I don’t have that kind of money.” He looked at me and said, “You paid twenty dollars per cigar?” And I told him, “It’s your birthday. I got you the best.” I could see the light bulb go off in his head.

My dad’s been an entrepreneur his whole life. He hit it big in the rope chain business in the ’80s, even opening a factory in the Dominican Republic. He bought the box himself, sent it to his brother in the Dominican Republic, and said, “Find someone who makes these, or something like them. Let’s get some samples and start a business.”

For the next 30 years, Sundays became our ritual; me and my dad sitting together, smoking cigars, talking about family and a little bit of business. It became our thing.

I imagine that was impactful—that part of your relationship with your dad and how it’s grown?

Oh, yes. We’re talking college years at that point. Then I got engaged, I got married, and eventually he became a grandfather. The conversations kept evolving. Of course, being in business with your father also has its downfalls. Everything ended up becoming business talk. My dad is a workaholic to a fault. I guess back then that was the norm.

A different era.

Yes. It made me just the opposite, because you're never going to get these years back. I didn't want to miss that for my kids. I can even say that I neglected the business.Orders would come in without me really having to work hard at it. Yes, we could have made 25 percent more, but it wasn't worth me missing my first 10 years of my kids' lives. Rewinding back to 1994: It wasn’t necessarily because we had a superior product at the time that we were successful. The timing was right. The market was going through the cigar boom in the mid-’90s. Supply and demand. There weren’t enough cigars, so people wanted them more.

It ended up being a $1 cigar at that time for a premium Connecticut. That’s where we started with our Española Connecticuts. My dad ordered 10,000 cigars, and he famously said, “If I don’t sell any, I’ll have cigars for the rest of my life.”

That’s a good position to be in.

Our first trade show in 1996 completely sold out. That's why our cigars are called Española 1996, because it's the year that they were in production. Mind you, I'm now in college. I'm doing two or three hours a day and then going to the office. It got so busy that I dropped out. It was great up until '97, '98, then everybody was in the cigar business. The market was flooded, the tobacco was green, but because the demand was there, they rushed the hands of time, like Fuente's quote.

We were lucky to have a wonderful blender at the time named Papo. He basically raised me in the tobacco world. He taught me everything I know about cigars and tobacco in general. Papo now works for Blackbird Cigar, they're the ones who make our Española cigars.

You had two mentors. Dad was giving you the work ethic, and then Papo—

Was teaching me the ropes. Now, I’ve dropped out of school. I’m working full-time. And the cigar boom turns into a cigar bust. We’re trying to sell $3 cigars wholesale. Our neighbor is selling premium cigars for $1 because he’s going out of business. We can’t compete.

That’s how JM was born. We had to pivot. At the same time, I meet my future wife, who is fast-tracking a PhD program at UCLA—comparative literature—just the smartest person I know. She asks me, “Where are you going to school?” It’s one of those questions: “What’s your favorite song? What’s your favorite color? What school do you go to?” I was embarrassed to say, “I’m actually not. I’m working full-time. I have a successful company,” blah, blah, blah. Youcould see in her eyes that she caught the ick.

At this point, I’m trying to impress her. I go back to Pierce College. I basically breeze through. Afterwards, I applied to only one business school, and that was USC, Marshall School of Business. To be honest, I think the years off really helped me get in because my entrance essay was all about that. Bringing in real-world experience was huge. One of the case studies I did at school was about DeWalt. The DeWalt power tools at the time were black, and then they changed to yellow and black. If you're looking at power tools across the street, you see the yellow, you don’t need to see

DeWalt. You know it’s DeWalt. At the time, our cigar boxes were cream colored, and I said, let's change it. Let's go with yellow and black. Yellow and black became our identity. That was what I brought to the table.

What's cool about it is that it's elegant but it's simple. It's not hitting you in the face with the gold and the red and the ba-boom.

Exactly. Next year marks 25 years of JM, and we’re celebrating with JM’s aniversario—a long-filler cigar in a tube. We’re working to change the perception of JMs as a cheap cigar.

We call it value-priced, and with this aniversario release we want people to see that we’re doing it right. Again, it's going to be a $10 to $15 retail cigar. Not incredibly expensive. We really want to show the consumer that JM is a premium cigar and that we can also provide a long-filler quality product.

Could you see it as a rebrand? Let Española be your flagship?

I think what JM’s aniversario is going to do is make people say, “Oh, these guys can make quality cigars,” and JMs are made by the same people. I feel like it’s going to elevate the value-price cigars more than it’s going to be a rebrand. It’s a shift in the way people will think about JMs. Española, we’re treating as its own entity. Some people might be biased against Española because they know that JM makes Española. I like to compare it with Toyota and Lexus. It’s the same company.

A Toyota is going to get you where you need to go as well.

Totally reliable. Then if you want the luxury, the premium: Lexus, Española. Speaking about aniversarios, as you know, we had good success with our Year of the Dragon, which was our first ever limited-edition release.

What I’ve learned is the importance of trickling things out and not doing everything at once. Year of the Dragon was only one size, one wrapper. With its success, we added the Corojo Española Year of the Dragon to our core line of cigars in only one size. We want to trickle out the sizes and have more things the consumer can wait for and be excited about. The limited edition actually helped the core line. People were like, “Let me try the Maduro, let me try the Connecticut.”

The feedback was great. We started sending out Year of the Dragon to be reviewed, but also our Connecticuts and Maduros. They all came back with ratings over 91. We’re thrilled about that.

Having the luxury of a steady business really enabled us to take a chance and work on something that we were proud of, something that my family would smoke and enjoy smoking. That was the creation of the Corojo line.

Some brands rest on their laurels, but you’ve used that foundation to elevate Española. What’s your short-term vision for the line? And your long-term?

Short-term, we have our Española aniversario coming out, and that’s going to be two separate wrappers. We’ve got a Maduro wrapper, which I’m very, very proud of. Then we have our Habano wrapper, which is probably going to be my favorite cigar. Those cigars were rolled early 2025. They’ve been sitting, waiting for packaging. They’ll be ready to go. The first time anybody is going to get their hands on them will be at PCA 2026. We’ll have a release party there.

Other short-term projects in the works for Española are new sizes for our line. We’re adding a double toro 6 x 60 to all three blends, and a robusto size to our Corojo line. The Corojo will have a robusto, a toro, and a double toro. The rest will be the same, except they have a Churchill line.

In the past couple of years, I’ve had a little more freedom to explore newer things. It was very interesting to work with other people who had more input. My dad isn’t a flashy guy. I don’t think he’s ever given an interview. He’s always been the guy in the background; blue-collar attitude, working. This business needs a spokesperson, a story. I found myself coming into that role, and it’s paying off.

Sometimes the simple story is the best story. It's like with writing, it doesn't have to be flowery. It just has to be honest and true.

You have to enjoy the experience. It changes. It depends on what you eat. It depends on what you're drinking with it. If you're having water or if you're having a scotch with it, your cigar is going to taste different. You're going to get different notes.

I’ve had cigar makers ask me things like, “Did you pick all these notes? Did you pick up that hint of cardamom?” Or people say, “It tastes like my wife’s chocolate cake.” As a consumer, I want a cigar that looks good, it’s refined, it feels good in my hand, it has a great draw, has some subtle flavor, it’s creamy, holds ash. How does your palate run?

Great question. I went to culinary school. I'm big with food. My taste and smell are very heightened. Saying that, I don't pick up cinnamon, I don't pick up chocolate, cocoa. What I pick up is spice. I pick up earthiness. I pick up creamy notes, but it's very hard for me to identify. Chocolate cake? Lemons? Maybe. What I look for is a beautiful wrapper, an oily wrapper. Construction, and draw.

Do you like pairing cuisine with cigars?

No. At this point, I feel like I'm my kids’ personal chef.

[laughter]

We love cooking as a family. We like to be outside. We love entertaining. Getting people together is also a characteristic of the cigar. Sharing our cuisine, sharing our cigars with people, it's something that warms my heart.

You're chefing in a couple of different ways.

Absolutely. Blending cigars and blending food.

That's wonderful. Where do you want to be in five years?

I want Española to be a household name. I don't need the credibility, necessarily, but I want to be talked about. I want to know that I'm putting a good product out there, and that people are gravitating toward it.