Cigars for Warriors: The Mission Continues

Giving back to those who give the most.

Everybody has their special way to “support the troops.” For the cigar community, it’s Operation: Cigars for Warriors.

Cigars for Warriors (CFW) is a volunteer-run, award-winning non-profit 501c3 charity organization whose top priority is to collect and distribute premium cigars and accessories to U.S. service members serving in combat zones, as well as long-term deployed troops.

Famous Smoke Shop has been a proud supporter of the Cigars for Warriors since the group started – and even now, we’re offering a limited inventory of Op: CFW Cigars by Oscar to bolster the group’s work.

“You know, because you guys really put us on the, you know, put us on the map, and we were just getting a request all of a sudden out of nowhere. And, between you guys and Drew Estate at the very beginning, and Boveda, it's what made it work,” says Storm Boen, CEO of Cigars for Warriors.

Today, we catch up with Storm about the state of the CFW mission, how the group got here from a “slightly impossible goal,” and their exclusive Op: CFW cigars from Oscar.

Interview with Storm Boen, CEO of Cigars for Warriors

CA: Considering you’ve been at this for 13 years, that means a lot of people have always had Cigars for Warriors be a part of their cigar world.

SB: It's been an interesting ride for sure, we go all the way back to the days that when Cigar Advisor started, I used to write an article for y'all every issue. Remember? (I remember.) So, yeah, we've just - if we haven't broken it, it'll be this week: 1,700,000 cigars shipped out.

CA: That’s incredible.

SB: I think Famous Smoke still has a record for single largest retailer donation. That goes all the way to 2016, it was almost 47,000 cigars. Even though you weren’t really pushing it out to the public. So, I always thought y'all should've gotten a lot of credit for that.

CA: Take us back to the beginning and refresh everybody on how Cigars for Warriors got started.

SB: It was an accident. I guess, I was still on military - on medical orders. And my brother-in-law would come over to the house, we'd work on my man cave in the back. And one day, he says, let's go get a cigar.

You know, in the military, we smoked cigars, a lot of what we did was tradition. And I did it when I was deployed, especially in ‘03. That was a big one with a lot of suicides going on in Iraq. And, you know, I'd make my guys smoke a cigar after a really bad day.

Now it doesn’t sound kosher to say you made them, but, the alternative was guys going to corners and dwelling on this shit all day. So, yeah. And they knew for the next 2 hours, they could literally say anything they wanted, including calling me a lot of 4 letter words. So, it was a good way to get some, you know, stress management. And I thought, you know, that was an original idea. I'm gonna find out how we do this. So we started kinda doing it on our own, a few of us.

CA: And that experience you wanted to enable others to have.

SB: Out of the 7 original members, we still have Elaine and myself. I do consider Jonathan Drew one, since he was deep into the very beginning and still, I mean, still as an adviser to this day. And our very first meeting, I said, “you know, at the very end of this, we gotta have a 1-year goal that's slightly impossible.”

And I was like, “how about 800 cigars?” And they're like, “how in the hell are we gonna do that?” They're all yelling at me, chewed me out saying, “where are we gonna get 800 cigars? Where are we gonna find the names of people? How are we gonna vet it? How are we gonna do this?” I was like, “guys, I don't know!”

That's why it's a slightly impossible goal. And, by the end of the 1st month, we shipped out 860. So we broke our 1 year goal in the 1st month. And then, by the end of the 1st year, with help from Famous, we shipped out 92,300 cigars. So that's when we figured out we're doing something right.

CA: You mentioned vetting the recipients. I know Operation: Cigars for Warriors is pretty specific on who you’ll send cigars to.

SB: We've always been blessed from day 1 having active duty personnel on board with us and the board as a military liaison, which means as far as the public's concerned, we're able to vet every single request. A lot of people don't realize just because it's APO address, does not mean it's gonna be a US service member. Could be a contractor. Could be a UN ally. Could be a NATO ally. Could be a host nation ally. You just never know what you're dealing with. That was very important to us. If you make a donation to us, I want you know, it's only right that your donation, whether it's one cigar or 10,000 cigars, is going to a US serviceman because that's who you donated it for.

We've always been very, very particular about that. And I think even as the years have gone by where other organizations might loosen up the standards, if anything, we've gotten a lot stricter.

CA: How many people does it take to make this all happen?

SB: Well, you look at national statistics on volunteers and how hard they work. A great volunteer, you're blessed if you get them for 6 months. You're blessed if someone works for 3 months out of the year, consistently every year. We've had guys that have been with us since 2012. I'd say we'd probably still have that 23, 24 folks have been with us since then, you know, from the beginning all the way to the first year mark.

I've always been proud of that. And then we've gone over probably, I don't know, 23, 2400 volunteers over the last decade or so. I think we're around 2,000 stores where at one time, you know, Famous Smokes was number 3, you know, behind Smoker's Haven here in my hometown and Republic Cigar in San Antonio. And then all the way up to Pennsylvania, Famous Smoke was next.

CA: So, as it stands now, there are over 2,000 donation locations?

SB: Yes, sir. It goes up and down, but even aside from bringing in special things like these Oscar Cigars - the shops always do the right thing and want to be involved. And so you know, the minimum standard to be a donation location is easy: you put out a humidor. You take pictures. And once a month, you ship the donations to Florida. You know, that’s the minimum. And if anybody doesn't know what they're doing, they just have to have the humidor out and the signage out.

CA: Operation CFW Cigars by Oscar is part of what the charity calls their “Synergy Program.”

SB: “It was an idea that I thought I just threw out, not thinking anybody in their right minds would ever agree to it,” says Boen. “And the way it works is, we come up with the box design and signage and band design, etcetera. And then, it’s sold only through our donation centers - so it's kind of a giveback to the shops, who get a limited edition cigar.”

CA: Cigars for Warriors gets 100% of the manufacturer’s profits for these special edition series cigars?

SB: At the time, I was thinking nobody in my mind would agree to that. And Hiram & Solomon were the first to sign up, he was like, “that's perfect.” So, you know, it kinda took me by surprise. So we started working on it. I was walking back to our booth at the TPE trade show, and Robert Caldwell saw me. And me and him, his wife, had been talking about he's been wanting to do something with us. I said, well, Jaime Solomon just signed up to our new program…

He goes, “excellent. We're gonna do that.” Kinda blow me away. You know?

And Kretek was there, Ventura Cigar who has Slaughterhouse. So we did a Slaughterhouse cigar, too. We called it The Operator. And then the fourth one's this one with Oscar Cigars. The first two batches sold out. (Ed. Note: except for our limited stash – we have the last of the previous run.)

CA: So take me through the process. I walk into our retail store here at Famous, and I put a couple of cigars in the donation box. How do these cigars get from here to troops overseas?

SB: So, Storm goes into Famous. I see John. I see a donation box. I brought in 5 sticks out of my little humidor. I put them in there.

Some shops do month-long raffles, you know, different things. But once that's donated once a month, Famous Smoke will have a CFW coordinator there. That person will help you count the cigars, verify them. If there's money that’s been donated, the money gets exchanged for a check from the store. That way, cash isn't just floating around. So we get a check from them, and we get cigars from them and cutters, lighters, coffee, you know, almost anything they throw in there. And then when it gets to the store, you know, majority of the donate centers in United States send to Florida. Up northeast, we have Peter Toro.

Once they get there, the cigars get looked at, to make sure they're not damaged. If they're dried out, Boveda has been very good to us by giving us multiple percentages so we can rehabilitate them if the humidity is low. If the cigars are damaged, and I don't mean cracked foot. I mean, like, the cap coming off, holes in it. Tobacco beetles, whatever the case. We're very - we don't wanna send them bad cigars.

Once they’ve dry boxed, then they go into coolers with Boveda packs. (“Boveda was our first company to ever get on board with us, before we even had a name,” says Storm. “They've been very generous.”)

Then the troops that are deployed, they will send a request in; it goes to our Active Duty Major in Operations. She verifies that they are, one, active duty; and then number 2, is that they are deployed. Some guys can actually be in the military, and not be on orders, and go down there as a contractor. We don’t send cigars to contractors. They're making a quarter million tax free. They can order the Cubans or whatever they wanna order. Now if John is down there in civil affairs or special forces or something else, and he's got a contractor embedded with him. He wants to share his cigars, they're John's cigars at that point.

Something very big is once John gets those cigars, they're his. Majority of troops share with their squad or platoon, depending on where we are that year.

CA: And how many donation shipments is that each year?

SB: We’re shipping about 450 boxes a month. It’s almost every week we're shipping out, and it's I would say, average, it's 450 a month, maybe 500. Now that the Deeming Rule (FDA’s attempt in 2016 to place heavy restrictions on the premium cigar industry) has been vacated, everything's starting to come back again.

In addition to donations, a lot of manufacturers helped get us through: Micallef, Oliva, Drew Estate, Avanti. And those are great cigars, Avanti and Toscano, because guys can throw them in a backpack. So those are great sticks for that. Not to mention, when you're in some of those locations, having something flavored like Avantis, it's good. May not be what you wanna smoke in a cigar shop or at home, but when you're deployed like that, sometimes that's a very nice touch.

CA: Was there a point over the past 12 years, maybe a defining moment, where it all took off? Meaning, did it even happen that way, or was it just more of a gradual cycle or period of growth?

SB: There's never been anything gradual. You know? It was supposed to be, like, a 3 hour a month hobby. You know? The first week was 60 hours.

Second week was 70 hours, and it stayed that way. I remember me and Ben Edmondson used to talk about, “can't wait till next month when it slows down.” It hasn't slowed down in 12 years.

There was the 2012 trade show, when you were hooked up with Jonathan Drew in the Drew Estate booth…

That was a big one. Drew Estate started out at a 1,000, and then became 2,000 plus…every event and every trade show and every festival, whatever they had left over, they just went to us. That was a big number. And then I would say the second one was, Famous started pushing 3 to 5, 6, up to 7000 cigars a month. And now that was a huge number, especially for us in those days. So I would say Famous was a big piece of that shooting straight up. Being on Cigar Advisor was a big piece of that.

CA: Let’s talk about today’s Oscar project. Tell me as much as you can - what's the blend? How did it you guys get it there?

SB: You know, it's got a Corojo wrapper. I could tell you what's in the middle, but I'd be lying to you as far as the filler right now. The companies that do the cigars do the blending. We just approve it.

CA: But it's gotta have your stamp of approval before it goes in.

SB: So, Alvaro, who does a lot of the the stuff, sent me 6 blends, I think. And for me, a cigar is great or it's not great. I'm not that guy who can go, “it tastes like a piece of leather out of a Connecticut field from Macau in 1973.” None of that. I never was that guy.

Everybody tells me, they love the Oscars. Oscar has, you know, blown up really big. It took about a year to come up with everything. The idea was to be a 50 caliber bullet, like, a specialty box.

CA: I love that they stand up.

SB: Yeah. That's just so cool. It's designed to look like a specialty 50 cal box. And I like the banding. He did that as a surprise. The original ones we sent and I approved, it looks different, but he did dog tags with the dish. And I really, really liked it a lot.

This one took a little longer to get off the ground, but it man, it went perfect. We'll probably, with Oscar Cigar with the numbers, we'll probably raise $25,000 for charity, which is a good number.

CA: That's a big thing.

SB: That is a huge piece of this. The manufacturer is putting 100% of risk behind themselves. Which, again, I never thought anybody in a million years would agree to that.

But we’ve done four, and I am very proud of all of them. And I would say the biggest part you really need to know is that these companies that did it, they didn't do it for themselves. They did it to support the troops. For me, it's humbling, very humbling that they would take these huge financial risks to do this project with us. And I hope, if anything, the public can understand, I hope they get that picture that number 1, they're great cigars. And number 2, it's the love behind the project. It wasn’t just one or two people involved. We’re talking about multiple teams at CFW, multiple teams at different companies. And then you got retailers like you guys that stepped up, y'all stepped up big time.

CA: Over a dozen years, and here we are, all still going – now with Oscar.

SB: It's amazing how it works out. That's true. But I can't emphasize, John, not just because me and you were talking and not because you're putting us in your magazine. I pretty much emphasize almost every if I get back to the history, I always emphasize Famous, especially the beginning days are one of the biggest things that got us off our feet. And I hope your readers know that. Appreciate that fact. You and the whole, you know, family has always been taking care of us. I appreciate that, man. That's nice.