SHOW & PATEL

By David W. Brown

The next time you visit your local Rouses Market, be on the lookout for a display case of cigars unlike any you have seen before. The colors will be the first thing you notice. Rather than the typical drab, upright coffins the color of paper bags, you will notice sealed, translucent boxes featuring dozens of premium brand cigars in vibrant, vertical tubes. The personality of each cigar will be as distinct as the bottles of wine on our shelves. The display cases are, in fact, sophisticated, revolutionary humidors made by a company called Tubeaux. You'll see them first at our stores because Tubeaux was invented by a Rouses team member: Barton Howard, an executive at the company.

“It was birthed out of necessity,” says Howard. “We needed a way to be able to display the merchandise in our premium tobacco program, but we didn’t have enough space to do it properly. Before Tubeaux, there has never been a compact way to display cigars in humidors.”

The idea came to him when he was in his office one Sunday night several years ago. While working, he was idly tapping a slender protective cigar tube called a “tubo.” He turned around for a brief moment, and when he returned his attention to the work on his desk, he noticed that the tubo was still standing upright. The solution to the cigar display problem struck him immediately.

“I thought to myself: a display for tubed cigars, just like candy or cigarettes in convenience store vending machines work,” he says. “They would be displayed vertically and pushed out.” It was a eureka moment.

Howard has always preferred cigars that are sold in tubos because of the versatility the slender tubes provide. A cigar in a tubo can be kept in your pocket, the cupholder in your car or the console of a boat, all without the smoker needing to worry about the cigar inside being damaged. He figured that someone provided the sort of compact humidor that he was envisioning, and he began scouring the Internet. Such a thing did not exist, he discovered.

So, he decided to make one himself. Which wasn’t easy! Where does one go to manufacture something that doesn’t exist? How does a person explain what that “something” is without saying what it is because the invention—so elegant in its simplicity—would be transformative for the $18 billion global cigar industry? And a very easy idea to steal, at that. How does one do all this and not sound crazy to the people and companies approached? It took some doing, but Howard finally found a company willing to sign a nondisclosure agreement and talk specifics. And right away, the company agreed: this thing was a killer idea. “They immediately devoted all their resources to help me over the next two-and-half years to get the product to the marketplace,” Howard says.

Product research and development alone took 18 months. They tried dozens of different springs and designs to account for the hundreds of different types of cigars and tubes. Some tubes have screw caps on the bottom. Some hatch open in the middle. Some are made of glass. Some are aluminum. The weight and size of the cigars inside the tubes vary. “Ultimately, I wouldn’t bring the product to market until I acquired every tube that was available in the world and was able to display and dispense every single one in exactly the same way.”

Moreover, he wanted Tubeaux humidors to be modular: capable of being installed on a countertop or shelf, or even in large, traditional humidors already in stores. Though cigars are a centuries-old tradition, Tubeaux would also leverage modern technology, with its humidors monitored remotely.

To understand just how groundbreaking Tubeaux is, consider this. Previously, stores were required to install humidors four feet across, 18 inches deep, and six feet high. With Tubeaux, he says, “if you can give me the width and the height of a bottle of wine, I can give you four boxes’ worth of cigars. Traditional humidors are basically coffins; they are where cigars go to die. Tubes of cigars, though, are beautiful. From a retailer's perspective, why would you not want to showcase these?” But first he had to name the product. “Tubo” is a big word in cigars, and he went to GoDaddy to buy tubo. com. Then he saw the price: $65,000. So that wasn’t happening. But Howard is a Louisiana man, and if there is one suffix you cannot escape here, it is -eaux, from the ubiquitous French names of the region. Thus was born Tubeaux. The price of his new website, tubeaux. com: $14.99. “One cool thing,” he says, “is I had someone who speaks multiple languages tell me there are multiple meanings in the word Tubeaux itself. First, obviously, the pronunciation of our spelling is the same as the word itself.” Moreover, the “ub” (oob) part of the name derives from the word über, meaning “premium.” Eau, he explains, is the French word for water, which can relate directly to the proper humidity for cigars. Inside of a single word, he managed to convey luxury humidity for tubos.

Howard wasn’t originally the “cigar guy” for Rouses. His job as vice president of asset and profit protection for the company had him overseeing such things as receiving operations, risk management, security Investigations, continuity of operations, emergency preparedness, and disaster planning. Cigars were a passion, and because Rouses did not have a proper program to sell them, he found himself having to travel to New Orleans to find the best ones.

“I thought to myself, ‘The customer’s there. I'm there. We just have to build a program that customers can be confident in.’” He believed that by offering something unique to Rouses customers, the cigar afficionados would naturally come—especially in geographic regions not necessarily serviced by traditional brick and mortar cigar stores. “It's been a wild success for us,” he says.

Tubeaux, with its modularity and small footprint, has allowed Rouses Markets to deploy premium cigars even to stores without free space for traditional humidors. They will soon hit a much larger market as well. His company recently signed a deal with Rocky Patel Premium Cigars, which over the span of 25 years has built one of the largest, most well-respected independent cigar manufacturers in the business. For the next ten years, “Tubeaux by Rocky Patel” will be available at stores across the country and around the world.

“The premium cigar industry has been displaying cigars incorrectly forever,” says Howard. Worse, he says, it has created an assumption that for someone to be a cigar smoker, he or she must be highly knowledgeable of the different types of cigars available and have an expensive humidor at home to keep things fresh. Cigars are sometimes unapproachable because they’ve gained a reputation for being extremely delicate and in need of reverential treatment otherwise afforded to totems or sacred artifacts. “The fact of the matter is that you don't need to know anything about premium cigars,” says Howard, adding that there is no need for someone to have a humidor at home for storage. “The beautiful thing about buying a Tubeaux cigar is that it's as if every cigar is already in its own humidor. It will taste fresher for a longer period of time. You can buy based on convenience when you are already in a Rouses doing your shopping, picking up one or two at a time.”

For those new to the leaf, Howard has advice to get you started in premium cigars. “Ninety-plus percent of the time, you will want to stick to something that is light in color when you are first starting out.” Light colors, he says—something closer to shades of vanilla or light caramel—usually indicate that it is going to be a lighter smoke. These are sometimes called Connecticut cigars (after their wrappers, which originated in the Connecticut River Valley), and are known for being mild and smooth. Conversely, cigars darker in appearance—those in dark chocolate or black hues—usually suggest more spice, or body.

When asked about his favorite cigar, Howard doesn’t hesitate: “My favorite cigar is a Rocky Patel Aged, Limited and Rare.” As the name suggests, Patel makes these in small batches, and ages them for three years before putting them on the market.

Although you will see Tubeaux humidors everywhere soon, you saw them first at Rouses. Being the first store to use a revolutionary cigar humidor should not come as much of a surprise to longtime shoppers, however. The company has always prided itself for being the first in the area to offer all manner of shopping innovations to customers: delis, boiled crawfish, florists, bakeries—even electronic barcode scanning at checkout lines. Cigars are the next big thing—but they won’t be the last.