Listen for the hilarious father-son story that taught Tim Ozgener the importance of knowing your customer via adult-themed pipes! Previously, Tim owned and ran CAO with his father Cano Aret Ozgener and his sister Aylin. After a 12-year hiatus, Tim found his way back to the cigar business. Learn from the exercises that helped him pinpoint where to go next and how to design a brand like Nike does. In 2022, Tim launched Ozgener Family Cigars, which are distributed by Crowned Heads.

Interview by Rob Gagner.

What is Boveda? Cigar makers protect the flavor and character of their hand-rolled cigars with Boveda, that brown 2-way humidity pack that you find in a cigar box. At home, continue to use Boveda in your humidor to keep cigars well-humidified or they can be hard to light, burn to too fast or get moldy. With Boveda in your humidor, you'll enjoy full flavor from every cigar. Boveda has been keeping cigars tasting great for more than 25 years. Boveda Protects Your Premium Cigars. Guaranteed.

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00:00 Cold open

00:18 What made you launch a new cigar brand?

04:37 Crowned Heads: If you ever want to get back into cigars, let us know

04:53 How to build a brand like Nike

05:53 Where Christians and Muslims come together

08:01 Opposing forces come together over cigars

08:18 Meditate with a cigar

11:55 What I learned from my father

13:43 Celebration of Life or a funeral

16:32 Bring out the p*rn* pipes

18:54 Story behind Ozgener Family Limited Edition PI Synesthesia Cigars

20:08 Starting OZ Arts Contemporary Arts Center @ozfamilycigars

(upbeat music)

- There's a story inside every smoke shop,

with every cigar and with every person.

Come be a part of the cigar lifestyle at Boveda.

This is Box Press.

- When people ask like to me,

which they have a lot recently,

is why are you getting back into the cigar business?

Part of the reason is,

is that I did an exercise during the pandemic,

that somebody recommended to me,

which was like a timeline of your life, right?

- So I heard that.

I kinda want to know what the exercise was

because it sounds very impactful.

- So yeah, a buddy of mine said there is a career coach

and I had never gone to see a career coach.

And I was like, I didn't really get it at first.

And he was like, he's helped a lot of prominent people

that I respected in Nashville

kind of get in touch with, "What is your sweet spot?"

Meaning what have you derived a lot of joy of?

What did you love doing?

And did other people enjoy it too,

and derive pleasure from it as you just expressed?

And so it was like literally he said,

"It's gonna take a lot of time,"

but during the pandemic, especially when it flared up,

we had time to do it.

So it's like literally,

almost like a bookmark size kind of column,

for each year of your life,

since you were born.

And for me, like we are visual.

So I would draw a caricature

of like, if it was a trip I went on with my parents,

you know, when we went to Florida or something,

I would draw like a beach

or something that I remember about that trip

and that would be on the up column highlight.

If it was something that happened that wasn't great,

I would illustrate what that was

and put it in the down column.

You know, like my hair falling out,

I would put hair on the floor.

No, I'm just kidding. - Yeah, yeah.

- But I didn't actually have that as a visual,

but I thought it would be funny

because you have. - It's good.

- Such great hair and I don't. - It's a good visual.

- But anyway, so as I did that, I noticed,

and then you kind of make it a line,

like the stock market,

this year was up, this year was down, this year was neutral.

And I noticed that at the top,

it was when I was in the cigar business

creating stuff like Brazilia, for example.

- That's the one I have signed.

- Oh really? - The ashtray.

- Yeah, that's for the ashtray.

But the whole rationale is that why,

because I went down to the factory, I smoked a cigar,

that was like, "Wow, this is amazing"

with this Arapiraca wrapper from Brazil,

and how can I communicate that to people

so that they know that,

"Oh, I can make the box look green and da da da da."

So it was almost like it starts.

- Why green?

- Because that's the color of the Brazilian flag,

you know what I mean?

So we made the packaging look like the Brazilian flag

to convey to people that this blend,

the star of the show of this blend

is the Brazilian wrapper, in this case.

Like it all started organically

like from what is the cigar.

And then like trying to convey that through visual imagery

so that the consumer's like,

"Okay, I get it, it's Brazilian,

they can smoke it."

- The North Star is always Brazil.

So it's like the Brazilian wrapper.

And now it's onto, "How do I convey that this is Brazil?"

It's the image, the logo.

- That's right. - The colors

of Brazil. - That's right, that's right.

- The stuff that is the heritage of Brazil.

- Right, right.

These are the people that live there.

- This is the, what is it?

Nationalism?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That they feel. - That's right.

And have part of their identity.

- That's right. So part of it

was like what I connected with,

was the creativity of it,

whether it was the blending and the nuance of the blending.

Like the spices that you experienced, right?

And then also communicating,

creating and communicating.

How do we create it?

How do we communicate it to people?

- That's the marketing part of it.

That's the whole, like. The packaging.

- The marketing. - How do you get

the customer to pick it up, and wanna try it?

- Right, right.

So after I kind of identified that,

I'm like, all right, my sweet spot then

was what I was doing in the cigar business,

so I need to kind of get back into that.

And once I did that,

then I was fortunate that I had a friend

who went through a brand building at Nike and Google.

And he led me through the process of.

- This was your coach?

- No, this was like an aside from the coach,

but the coach helped me identify what the sweet spot was.

Got it. - And then he was like,

You need to. - And then you go.

- Operate there.

And once I determined what that was,

I was like, "Okay, I love the cigar business.

That's in my passion, so I gotta get back into it."

Now my former colleagues at CAO started Crowned Heads,

and they said to me, they basically said,

"If you wanted to get back into the cigar business,

we'd love to have you back into the cigar business."

And so then I was like, "Okay, they're encouraging."

And then I was like, "How do I do this?"

And then my friend,

that was the designer at Nike and Google said,

"I'll take you through the brand process

and how you start from nothing

and build a brand, which you start from the core.

"Who are you?

What are your values?

What do you believe in?

And I knew that my family was at the core of who I was,

because I'm such a family guy.

And we determined, we had four circles that we came up with.

And then we wanna get,

how do these four circles

bleed into something in the middle?

What is that in the middle?

That's the sweet spot.

Which was like quality, flavor, ingredients and good humor.

But good humor isn't just you and I laughing,

or me doing something that makes you laugh.

It also has to do with like, "What are our shared values?

How can we kind of interact with one another?

How can we relate to one another?"

And a cigars such a great way,

to bring people together.

So I was like, okay.

And then we went,

then you go into more surface stuff,

like what did we do in the past?

What did we like?

What are we attracted to?

What shapes? What colors?

What artist, you know what what?

And also I said, look, this brand and who I am

has to do with the fact that my father is an Armenian,

born and raised in Istanbul, Christian background.

And my mother is Turkish and my mother,

that's more of a Muslim background. Istanbul.

Istanbul is where East meets West,

and you have like a bunch of bridges.

- Constantinople. - A bunch of bridges

that connect East and West.

And then they met in the U.S.

but the U.S., my mother was a Fulbright scholar

going to Bank Street College of Education,

right across the street from that was Columbia University.

And my father was a mechanical engineer.

He was getting his degree at Columbia over there.

And they met at the International House.

And we found an old black and white photo of them on a boat

with a Statue of Liberty in the background.

And I was like, even though they didn't come here

on Ellis Island on a boat, they flew in.

- That's a visual right there.

- That I was like, I grabbed that visual and I said,

we gotta use the Statue of Liberty in our new packaging.

And then we had the foothills of Tennessee.

So when you look at the packaging,

you have Mount Ararat in Armenia on one side,

and the Armenian flag piping around.

And the other side you have the Bosphorus in Turkey

and you have the ribbing of the Turkish flag around it.

In the middle you have the Statue of Liberty

shining a light through, which represents hope.

Because when you come to this country,

you wanna make a better life for yourself.

You know what I mean?

There's a degree of like, "I made it, I'm here.

Now I have green fields ahead of me.

But you have over here mountains

because as you know, nothing is ever easy,

but it represents opportunity.

So these are the foothills of Tennessee,

which Tennessee has been a great kind of home for us.

And there's a boat in the middle that represents the journey

that at some point in time,

someone in our ancestry

had to go through to get into this country.

You know, in the case of my mother and father,

they did it through working hard

for their educational opportunities.

And so really the message of the brand

is that, like you alluded to earlier,

is that we might disagree on things, right?

You might have different viewpoints on certain things.

Or we may agree and we just wanna sit down and relax

and talk to us about like ideas that we have.

But in either case, if you sit down,

with a cigar and you smoke, what happens?

My father would always say,

"You are slowing down your breathing without knowing it.

You are inhaling, you are holding, you are exhaling,

breath out, like meditation or like yoga.

It's automatically happening to us

except we have the benefit

of having the flavor in our mouths,

smelling the aroma.

But then what happens is you are also getting

a little bit of nicotine through the edge of your mouth,

which makes us a little bit more alert.

So it's an interesting balance between relaxation,

And with also being attentive and a good, better listener.

So what you said earlier, 100% I think,

if more people enjoyed cigars

in the company of one another,

when you're trying to solve problems,

we would solve more problems.

I, 100% agree with that.

You would have more civil dialogue,

and more understanding between people,

which I think is really important.

- I got goosebumps

while you were talking about the whole logo

that's on this cigar box.

Just the amount of personal.

It's so personal,

that I get afraid that it's not relatable.

You guys are just like putting out something

that people can't,

they can't take that in

by just visually,

they don't have the insight.

They're ignorant to act the actual meaning,

unless you just explained it that way.

So on that note,

does that ever offend you

when they don't understand

how personal that badge, that symbol is for you?

- No, I mean it just presents an opportunity.

It presents an opportunity for the story to be told.

- Part of when the story's told then

do they get it? Yeah.

And the light bulb goes off?

Or has there ever been somebody

who is like, "Yeah, that's a cool story,

but I don't really care,

I just wanna smoke the cigar."

- That's fine too.

- You're okay with that?

- Yeah. - Because I would take

a huge offense to that.

- No, no. - After explaining

how personal, and how much time and energy I put in,

to actually creating that logo.

And then they said, "I don't care about the logo,

I don't care about it being on the band.

I just wanna smoke the stupid cigar."

- That's fine, listen,

it's for wherever you are, wherever you're at.

If somebody wants to smoke the cigar,

and doesn't care about the story, that's totally fine.

We're in a free country.

So it's up to like, however people want to,

wherever they are, wherever they're at, at the current time,

we're cool with everything, you know what I mean?

But, I do think it's the opportunity

to like to say the basic message is,

if these two could get married and live together

for 55 years.

and live and achieve the American Dream-

Your parents? - Yeah, yeah.

Then, and make a good life

where they have a family

and we live and grew up happily in the United States,

then we all can,

because the Armenian and Turks,

have this very complicated kind of history.

But yet these two individuals came together

over shared values.

And shared values specifically from my parents.

My father said to me before he died,

a few things that struck with me.

One of them is like, your education and your reputation

are very important.

And I always hold that, that's a gift that he gave me,

that I'll always hold with me.

And I tell my children all the time,

your reputation's really important,

you know what I mean?

So what you say, what I say,

what I'm saying to you now is I have to,

you know what I mean is my word is my honor.

You know, be honest, be truthful.

- It matters. - Be ethical, it matters.

Have good morals. - The words you choose

to express yourself matter.

- Yes, yes.

And then the other thing that he said, I remember to my kids

right before he passed away, is he said,

"There will be a lot of people

that will give you advice in this world,

but advice is easy to give.

- Yeah. - Do it.

- Doing it. - That action.

- That is more difficult.

- Way more.

- An ounce of action beats a ton of words.

That's deep.

So yeah, so then when we had a Celebration of Life,

my son, now he's 14,

at the time he was maybe a 10 year old.

I put the kids on the spot

and I did a Celebration of Life for my father,

which was more humorous,

because we had a lot of like funny times together.

But my 10 year old said,

my dad told me to not listen to anybody

and just do stuff.

So I'm not gonna listen to my dad anymore.

I'm like, that's actually not right.

- Right, you got it wrong. - You got it wrong.

- You got it wrong.

- Yeah right, so-

- Kid -

- You can't do that.

- Get the microphone

outta his face.

We've gotta have a conversation.

- And redo it.

- I was holding the mic, so I moved on.

I was like, yeah, don't listen to him. (chuckles)

- That's great.

Hang on one second.

I told you I'm a licensed funeral director.

I still hold that license.

And instead of saying funeral,

you said a Celebration of Life,

which can be kinda seen,

as possibly like a PC word or a buzzword,

in the funeral community

because they put it all over signs

and they try to take this sting outta death,

funeral, death, dead, dying.

Those words hurt.

A Celebration of Life, sounds fun.

But what I like about it,

is that you're not trying to mute the senses.

You're not trying to take the sting outta death

and the goodbye, the forever goodbye.

You'll never be able to speak to your dad ever, ever again.

- Yeah, right.

- But what you said when you said Celebration of Life,

you said how I'm going to continue

honoring my father's legacy,

since he's no longer with me anymore.

The number one thing that you have to do

is understand who your dad was to you

and now be your dad to other people in this world,

your kids, your wife, everybody.

You have to carry a piece of your dad with you.

And then express it, the action.

The action there is the more important part.

You could say, my dad was a very great guy,

who had a great sense of attention to detail

and I really appreciated that.

And then you could go out in the world,

and never worry about the details,

and never apply that to your actions.

But what I'm seeing is that you do,

you applied so much attention to detail to your logo.

of this new cigar line,

that I can see that your father's legacy

is still burning inside of you,

and being expressed in this world right now,

even though he's not with us.

- That's right. No, 100% right,

and it's a beautiful thing that you're saying.

And you always will carry a piece of,

in this case, my father with me, do you know what I mean?

And the values that I learned from him.

And you know, it's funny,

we're here at the trade show

and I came and worked this trade show

through its many changes of names,

- At first RTDA, ICPR, RPCA

- So when he first started CAO,

was Meerschaum Pipe Company

and I would come with him, so would my sister,

to help him at the RTDA show.

So there was one year and all we sold was pipes,

Meerschaum pipes made in Istanbul, Turkey.

Each one had a fitted case,

meaning each case had to be customized.

And didn't your uncle make those?

- Yeah, my uncle would get those made in Istanbul,

even though the pipe was made in a different city,

in Eskişehir, Turkey.

And so, one year we came over here,

and my father would be like,

"Okay, you will lay out the pipes on this table.

We just had four tables, right?

With tablecloths. - Flea market style.

- Yeah, we're opening the pipes, laying them out.

He's like, "Okay, put the $85 pipes here.

The $45 what.

So he had a rhyme to the reason.

And then we're opening pipes outta boxes, placing them.

And I open one

and I see it's like this full-on naked lady, nude pipe.

And I was like, "Whoa, I've never seen them before.

- I've never seen a pipe like that in my life.

- And I'm like, and then the next one, same thing,

next one same.

I'm like, dad, what's in it?

It was in a smaller box.

I'm like, "Dad, what are these pipes?"

And my dad's like, "Son, do not put those on the table.

Leave them, those are the erotica selection.

Put them underneath the table

and I will tell you the appropriate moment to open them.

And I'm like, "Okay, whatever."

So I put them underneath the table, they're hidden.

Day one passes, fine, no need for those pipes.

People come, they only buy the whatever,

they buy the pipes,

they put their name on them.

I put them in a plastic bag or a garbage bag, whatever.

Good day. two passes, nothing.

Day three, some of our Japanese customers,

start walking down the aisle.

And then my father taps me

and goes, "Son, bring out the porno pipes."

(Rob laughing) (Tim laughing)

They bought all of them. (laughs)

- They bought all of them?

- They bought all of them,

- How many? - I mean

- there were like 15, something like that of them,

you know what I mean? - They loved them all.

- They bought them all.

They're like, yeah -

Right, so that's a great memory.

- I love it. - I have of the trade show.

- So great. - So, but I learned

from that is that like, know your customer

and be opportunistic, you know?

So I mean, we were ready for it.

It was great.

It was an awesome memory,

I had. - Attention to detail.

- Yes.

- I know that you're working with Luciano

to make these cigars from ACE Prime.

Luciano has synesthesia.

- Yes.

- And it's where you kind of see colors

when numbers show up.

And numbers where colors show up.

And you get overstimulated and can't really focus.

Sometimes, that's what Luciano says, for him.

Did your dad also have synesthesia?

- No. - He didn't?

So what happened was the last 10 years of my father's life,

he had a lot of health issues.

My dad, before he started,

well actually while he started CAO,

even as a Meerschaum company,

he was working for DuPont,

and they had him work on Teflon, unmasked.

So I think that later in life,

that's where he might have gotten the health issues from.

- Teflon? - Yeah, because Teflon

is, you know what I mean?

- That is toxic. - Very toxic.

- So as a result, because I did a genetic test on myself,

and I was, okay. - Good.

They said, for your father it must have been environmental.

So I assume, I might not be right.

- It's just a hypothesis here.

- The last 10 years of his life though,

what brought him a lot of relief was painting,

because he connected to the colors of nature.

He would paint a lot of like trees or leaves,

or fields or flowers, and he loved that.

So then when we started our Contemporary Arts Center,

OZ Arts,

we did about two years of due diligence,

visiting other art centers.

And we're like, we like aspects of this or that, and.

- Put it all together to make the best.

- We modeled the art center

after a place called BAM in Brooklyn,

which started off as only music,

called Brooklyn Academy of Music.

And now they present arts of all different types.

So theater, dance, film, multimedia,

that kind of stuff.

So as we were visiting these places,

we visited this one place in Massachusetts

called MASS MoCA,

where they had this one artist

that literally had an X and Y graph

and was connecting like numbers,

like the X and Y with like threads of different color

or paints of different color.

And my father's like, "Well, I am a mathematician,

I can do numbers and colors too."

And then we found out that some people

have this thing called synesthesia,

where if I say one to you,

you think red or blue or whatever comes to you.

And so my father painted like 500 pieces of art,

the last five years, 10 years of his life.

A lot of them around this concept of synesthesia.

So, but he loved also the number pi,

because it was infinite, never ending, 3.1412.

- So how do you paint a never ending number?

You gotta just keep going?

- So what he did was he assigned a color with a number.

So for him, three was yellow, one was red,

four was green, let's say.

And so when Luciano and I were working

on the blending of these cigars,

he told me, he goes, I have this condition.

And then I'm like, yeah.

He kept saying about this condition,

I'm like, "Luciano, you seem perfectly fine.

What condition do you have?"

He goes, "I have this thing called synesthesia."

And I'm like, "You've got to be kidding me.

My father painted all these paintings."

And I started showing him on his website,

like all the different colors that he did around them.

And I said, "Luciano, let's make a cigar

that tastes like yellow.

Can we do that?

How do we do that? Let's play around with it."

So he got all excited with it, you know.

So we started having all these cigars,

that came in of with different kind of color.

And at first he was blending it

with a Colorado color wrapper.

I'm like, "No, no, no, it has to look yellow too."

So we gotta do Connecticut Seed Ecuador as the wrapper.

And then in the end we did a cigar that tastes like yellow.

So that is in the pi synesthesia blend.

And we used in here, I'm gonna open this

That, that you're looking at here, The Vista,

is an actual replica of a piece of art that my dad did

that was a tobacco leaf that he painted yellow,

and then he lacquered over it.

And so we took that painting

and we replicated it for The Vista.

So you can feel the veins on The Vista too.

- Yeah, you can feel the tobacco indentation.

- Yes, yes.

And that C that you see in the middle,

that was the signature that he used

at the bottom of all of his paintings.

He was good at calligraphy.

So that's what he did

- That was his signature?

That was his signature.

- Just the line?

- Just the C, the C that you see in the middle.

You know, you see that? - Oh, that's a C?

- That's a C. - It looks like a wavy line.

- That's a C.

- C for what?

- Cano, his first name was Cano.

- C-A-N-O. - Cano.

- Yeah, yeah..

- With a J? - With a C.

But in Armenian it's pronounced Ja.

So it's Cano. - So spell his name.

- C-A-N-O.

- C-A-N-O. - Cano.

- We would say Cano.

- That's right, which we did in Nashville.

So everybody would call him Cano.

But CAO came from his initials.

Cano - Cano.

- Aret Ozgener, that's right.

And so that's the C, right.

And then the the cigar, which we ran out of,

but I showed you the picture of it.

The band in the middle,

it's got all these different colors to it.

Those are the colors of pi,

based on an actual piece of art that he did,

that's hanging in our conference room at OZ Arts.

- If you head over to your social media,

what's the handle?

- Oh, it's @ozfamilycigars on Instagram,

- [Together] @ozfamilycigars.

- On Instagram. - Yes.

And you're gonna see a video.

of you talking about this.

- With the art behind me. - And you can see

the actual art behind you.

- Yes.

- And it's a 3D art.

- Oh yeah.

- It's big.

Takes up a whole wall, practically.

- That's right.

- You could go on and on and on with it,

because it's like an infinite number.

But he made it into a specific shape,

which is more of like a hexagon type of shape

that's in there, so yeah.

- Unbelievable.

- So the idea is this,

this year, this a limited edition

of 2,500 boxes of 12 based on yellow.

What does yellow for us? What did yellow taste like?

That was the objective of the blend.

The next year.

The number's one,

because that's the number of pi.

Red for Cano.

So that the question will be what does red taste like?

What does red look like?

- So each year coming up

with the Synesthesia Limited blend.

You're gonna take a new color.

- That's right.

- And a whole new blend.

- Based on-

- What does red taste like? - The color.

- And then the year after.

The next future year after red.

you'll go blue.

- Or whatever. - Or whatever that was

- And then you'll go green. - In my father's mind.

And then you'll go purple.

- That's right.

- So every year it's gonna be new blend.

- Now once you run out colors,

what are you gonna do?

- Well you know what, listen, it's infinite, right?

The colors? - Well pi,

if you looked at it,

there's a specific kind of like 3.1415.

- Yeah I know.

You know what I mean?

- Did he run outta colors to apply to pi?

Or did he keep mixing new colors?

- No no, whatever the color was that he assigned it with

and it repeated, it'll be that color again.

So if he establishes three as yellow

whenever three, however three appears.

- So we're going from,

we got 10 colors to work with.

- Pretty much.

- So this could be a 10-year project.

- It could be.

- But are you gonna be in the cigar biz,

for another 10 years?

- (laughs) I hope so. (laughs)

- I hope so. - So once you run out,

what are you gonna do?

Discontinue the entire project

and find something new? - Well, if people like it

and they want it to continue,

then all we do is we're just gonna follow

however the numbers go in pi,

do you know what I mean?

- So what if yellow comes back up.

- You just do yellow again.

- The same blend.

- You could do that, or you could try a different blend.

It depends on like what the consumers want.

If they want it.

- Sweet.

It's a never ending opportunity,

to continue blending. - The legacy.

- And smoking and trying cigars.

- But it's like you said also,

it honors him and his kind of idea.

And he lives on, even though he's physically not here.

- Full circle.

(laughs) Back to where we started. (laughs)

- I can't close it out any better way.

- No.