Jonathan Drew
Co-founder of Drew Estate, who built the company from a New York kiosk into one of Nicaragua's largest producers and sold it to Swisher in 2014.
Drew founded Drew Estate with Marvin Samel in 1996, selling cigars from a kiosk in New York before relocating to Nicaragua. The company's early identity rested on Acid, a range of infused cigars that sold in volumes no conventional premium brand matched and that much of the traditional trade regarded with open hostility. That commercial base funded everything that followed.
The second phase was a deliberate move onto traditional ground. Liga Privada, released in the late 2000s, used dark Connecticut broadleaf and stalk-cut wrappers and was aimed at exactly the buyers who had dismissed Acid. Undercrown, Herrera Esteli, Nica Rustica and the Kentucky Fire Cured line followed, the last using fire-cured leaf from outside the premium supply chain. Both families of blends are made at the company's Esteli factory.
Swisher International acquired Drew Estate in 2014, and Drew has continued in a leadership role. He also built Cigar Safari, the factory tour programme that made Esteli a destination for American consumers and that most large Nicaraguan factories have since imitated. His significance is less as a blender than as the person who demonstrated that a premium cigar company could be built on marketing and distribution rather than on inherited factory capacity.