Ashton, Sir!

Re-phrasing a well-known quotation, one can say that all classical histories of cigar brand creation look similar, whereas each unconventional history is original in its own way. The history of Ashton cigars, in which traditions and innovations intertwined in the most fanciful way, is an excellent confirmation of this statement.

The beginning of Robert Levin's cigar career, which has led to the American foundingr and owning the Ashton brand, can hardly be called anything other than modest: there were no famous tobacco producers among his predecessors, he was fairly indifferent to cigars, and his first cigar-related duty was daily floor sweeping at a tobacco shop. There was a certain continuity, though, since the shop was owned by his father.

In 1957, Levin Sr. who had engaged in garment manufacturing for a long time closed his old business and resolved to try himself in an entirely new one. Whether or not his constant pipe and cigar smoking was the decisive factor behind his choice, Albert Levin became the owner of the Holt's Cigar Co, one of the oldest tobacco shops located in Philadelphia's downtown business area. This is how cigars, tobacco, pipes, packaging of mail orders and accounting for sold items became part of 11-year-old Robert's life. Fron then on, after school he would go back to his father's shop, rather than home or to a football field.

Despite his father's desire to introduce his son to the family business, Robert Levin was reluctant to do so up until the early 1970's. It was not until 1972 after he graduated from college that he had to take the lead, because poor health forced his father to retire from business. But even then Levin did not see the cigar business as his calling, hoping that in a few months his father's health would improve, and he would be able to find something that he liked to do.

Holt's Cigar Co. had not gained much weight since the time of its purchase by Albert Levin. Many cigars were produced in Philadelphia back then. The shop bought products from local factories, retailing them at a price ranging from fifty cents to one dollar, not trying to expand business. The Levins' annual revenue was as low as $200.000 When Robert Levin realized that he would have to stay in business longer than expected he started thinking about its expansion. In 1980, he purchased another retail cigar shop—Harry A. Tint & Sons—that was even older than Holt's Cigar Co. The latter was founded in 1911, whereas the former dated back to 1898. In its heyday, this company had been the strongest player on Philadelphia's cigar market, importing all of the leading brands, including Cuban. But at the time Robert Levin bought it, the Company was in decline. Nonetheless, this acquisition played a major role in the fate of the Levins' company. On the one hand, it changed the status of the entire business: a previously inconspicuous trading company, Holt's became an importing company (on top of that, this deal pampered Levin's vanity, because he could now rightfully say that the history of his company dated back to the end of the 19th century). But on the other hand, and much more importantly, the purchase of the second shop and its merger with Levin's existing business helped him stay in business in a period when he took a chance on launching a risky, but much-anticipated project of creating and marketing his own cigar brand.

Robert Levin

Slow Ascent

When Robert Levin decided that he would produce his own cigars, he was by no means a rookie in his business and knew full well what his brainchild would look like. He thought people were smoking cigars that were too mild, and he wanted to create one that would be more tasteful and flavorful than most of those that were so popular with smokers. The second essential requirement that Levin established for himself was the use of the Connecticut wrapper. As for the name, it was suggested to Levin by David Field, a friend of his, an importer and distributor of English Ashton pipes. Since he carried those pipes in his shop, Robert Levin knew the person who manufactured them, a man named Bill Taylor, and knew that the brand was fairly successful; however, the idea of giving the same name to his cigars did not inspire him initially.

But his friend's persuasion and his argument that it would be much more efficient to promote a brand backed up by several different product names convinced him, and he gave in. Eventually, when Ashton cigars became popular and the business took off, Robert Levin bought out the rights for the brand from Bill Taylor and in 1992 became its exclusive owner.

Work on creating the cigar began in 1993. Levin visited all the manufacturers he was acquainted with and explained what product he needed. From all the samples, he chose the cigars made by Tabacos Dominicanos, or Tabadom, owned by Hendrik Kelner. This was before Kelner began producing Davidoff, and the product range of the factory comprised just several brands exported to Europe. A couple of years after their launch, Ashton cigars became the factory's biggest brand.

The new cigars were first presented to the public at an annual exhibition of the U.S. Tobacco Dealers Association (RTDA) held in Washington, D.C. in 1985. It would be an exaggeration to say that Ashton cigars had tremendous success because Levin landed only three or four orders from his business partners during the exhibition. But he did not count on anything more than that, knowing in advance that marketing the new product would be challenging. (The fact that not a single new brand entered the market at that time shows how difficult it was. Obviously, the cigar business was not on the rise back then.) Having no spare cash for advertising, Robert Levin decided to rely on something he was absolutely sure of: his connections among cigar retailers and the premium quality of his products that have since become the first brand of the super-premium Dominican cigars.

As a result, Ashton cigars became a national brand rather quickly and were sold throughout the country, not only on the local market in Philadelphia. Premium quality made it possible for Ashton to become one of the most expensive brands on the market (Ashton Churchills cost$ 2.50 per piece, and smaller sizes, from $ 1.70 to $ 1.25 in the first years of the brand's life), and then, after the Ashton Cabinets line had been launched, the most expensive one. When Ashton's annual production hit 300,000 cigars in 1988, and the disagreements between Robert Levin and Hendrick Kelner reached a head, the brand owner decided to stop cooperation with Tabadom. He craved further development of his business and already knew who could help him get there. Ashton production switched to the Fuentes family, old friends of Levin's, and a new, triumphant chapter opened up in the history of the brand.

Staggering Success

Close relations existed between the Fuentes and Albert Levin; so it's no wonder that his son turned to this particular family, when he decided to introduce major changes into his business. A couple of years earlier Ashton production was fully transferred to Tabacalera A. Fuente, pilot lots of Ashton Cabinet and Ashton Aged Maduro had been produced at the Fuente's factory in 1987 and 1988. In 1989, Robert Levin together with Carlos Fuente Jr. got down to creating a new tobacco blend, which reflected the combination of his own cigar tastes with those of Carlito, as Levin called his friend. Several months later, the upgraded Ashton cigars appeared on the market and, for the first time in the brand's history, Ashton supplies to Europe began.

The steady consumer interest in the brand and the obviously improved taste and quality, did exactly what was expected of them: during the 5-year cigar boom, from 1988 to 1992, Ashton production was skyrocketing, tripling in 1992, after publication of an article covering the brand in The Cigar Aficionado magazine. A year later, Carlos Fuentes had to make a considerable effort to meet the growing demand for his products. (At the same time, the Fuentes became Robert Levin's partner with a 35% stake in his Holt's Cigar Co.) In 1994, Ashton cigars' production level exceeded one million a year, and the next year, demand for them was higher than the supply.
But not only did the number of the cigars produced increased; six more product lines, with different composition and wrappers, were added to the first Ashton Classic Series over the twenty-one years of the brand's existence. The upgraded Ashton Classic from Holt's was followed by the Ashton Cabinet Series and the Aged Maduro Series. Whereas a mixture of Dominican tobaccos that matured for three—four years and Connecticut wrapper are used for Ashton Classic cigars coming in thirteen sizes, the tobacco used in the Ashton Cabinet Series (eight sizes) matures for six years, and the mixture includes at least six different tobacco varieties. The composition of Ashton Aged Maduro (seven different sizes) is similar to that of Ashton Classic, but the wrapper for them is fermented for a longer time, which gives it an exquisite dark color and a typical mellow taste.

Despite the indisputable success of Ashton's first three product lines, the release of the fourth one, the Ashton Virgin Sun Growth (VSG) Series, in November 1999 became the most successful presentation of a new product in Holt's entire history. Being not only a good businessman, but also a dedicated aficionado, Robert Levin noted that smokers' tastes were gradually changing and many of them are willing to smoke cigars with a truly strong and full-bodied taste. But there were no such cigars in his product range. In 1992, an idea came into his head to create a new series—Ashton Crown. The idea was that the Dominican wrapper from the Chateau de la Fuente farm would be used in their production, but, after the tremendous success of Fuente's Fuente OpusX, which had already used that wrapper, it became obvious that Carlos Fuente would not be able to manufacture Ashton Crown using this wrapper.

However, Robert Levin was not going to give up his idea, and some time later, when he came to the Dominican Republic again, Carlos suggested tasting a new cigar he had created. To say that Levin was in raptures would be to say almost nothing: it was the cigar of his dreams, surprisingly fragrant and strong—maybe even too strong. Later on, when Carlos Fuente got down to elaborating the tobacco blending for this cigar, he made its taste more refined due to longer tobacco maturation, but its original strength and full-bodied rich taste remained its distinctive feature. As for the composition, it remained unchanged compared with the one originally proposed by Carlos Fuente—the mixture of Dominican tobaccos of four- to five-year maturation for the filling and the wrapper from Ecuador, purchased from the Oliva family. The only problem left was the name of the new series. Soberly evaluating the changes that occurred on the market from 1992, when he first designed the Ashton Crown, to 1999, when the development of his new cigar was completed, Levin realized that the old name was no good: the market had already been flooded with all sorts of 'crowns'. Richard Meerapfel, a Cameroon farmer, one of Robert's best friends, came up with Virgin Sun Grown as a name for the cigar—Levin agreed.

The people of Holt's producing the Ashton VSG Series knew these cigars were bound to succeed, but their amazing success surprised even their creators. The Cigar Aficionado, an authority magazine on the cigar market, wrote about the 'frantic' demand for the new cigars 'unseen since the end of the cigar boom' in the early 1990s; the tests conducted by the same magazine gave Ashton VSG a rating of 93 points, one of the highest for non-Cuban cigars in the magazine's history.

Committed to his success, Robert Levin presented another new series of his cigars, Ashton Small Cigars, with a Central African wrapper at the RTDA exhibition in 2002 and almost repeated the success of the Ashton VSG Series in November 2003, by offering Ashton Heritage PuroSol to the public. These cigars added to the fame of the two cigar clans that were directly involved in their creation—the Fuentes and the Meerapfels; they were the result of a harmonious blending of Dominican tobaccos developed by Carlos Fuente Jr. and the splendid Cameroon wrapper specially grown for these cigars by Richard Meerapfel. As in the case with Ashton VSG, Ashton Heritage PuroSol caught the fancy of both the customers and the connoisseurs of the cigar market; in addition, the production level achieved by Holt's by that time spoke for itself: the company supplied six million cigars of the basic series and two million cigars of the Ashton Small Cigars series to the market in 2009. Of these 6 million cigars, approximately 600,000 cigars were Ashton Cabinets, 500,000 Aged Maduros, and 700,000 Ashton Virgin Sun Growns. Holt's latest novelty is a limited series of Ashton Estate Sun Grown (ESG) timed for Ashton's twentieth anniversary. During the next five years, Holt's is going to manufacture one size of these cigars annually, and then all of them will become available on the market. To manufacture Ashton ESG, Carlos Fuente used the Sun Grown wrapper raised from Cuban seeds for the first time at his Chateau de la Fuente farm.

Dreams Come True

The history of Robert Levin and the Ashton brand he created is a vivid example of the American dream come true. He turned a small tobacco shop purchased with $ 40,000 in the mid-1950s into a leading company in the industry. It is an uncontestable trendsetter on the non-Cuban cigar market. For many years already his business has been experiencing the most pleasant shortage one can imagine—the shortage of production facilities to meet the ever increasing demand. Robert Levin himself believes that a stable taste and ultra-high quality are the main secrets behind the Ashton cigars' success with the consumers. But almost no one will ever challenge his personal role in this success—the role of a shrewd innovative businessman and demanding cigar connoisseur who took the time to start liking them, but when he did, he did so in earnest and for good. Perhaps he showed up at the right place at the right time. Let others try to follow in his footsteps—and hopefully succeed.

Cigar Clan 6'2008. Ksenia Yakovleva