Generation Next
Date: November 9, 2009Publisher: Cigar Aficionado
Author: David Savona
New York, NY
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Description:
The Perez-Carrillos — Life After La Gloria
It's not easy to walk away from one of the best-known cigar brands in the world. Moving into the arms of your children makes it easier. In March, 57-year-old Ernesto Perez-Carrillo left the La Gloria Cubana brand, the cigar that was the hottest cigar brand in America in the early 1990s. Perez-Carrillo left to work with his children, daughter Lissette, 35, and son Ernesto Perez-Carrillo III, 27.
"One of the main reasons I decided to leave is that my children want to get involved with the new company," Perez-Carrillo said at the time. "The opportunity to work with my kids is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity." His daughter worked as a lawyer, his son was a private equity executive with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., the famous leveraged buyout firm. They are "two of the people that I trust most in my life," said the elder Perez-Carrillo during a family lunch in late June. Though eight years separate his children, they could almost pass as twins with their jet-black hair and lean frames. Lissette has her father's intense, piercing dark eyes and both have inherited his distinctive jawline
In the late 1970s, when La Gloria was largely unknown outside of the Little Havana neighborhood in Miami where it was rolled, young Lissette would watch her father work and sometimes lend a hand. "As a child I would go to the factory very often," she says. When she was five, six and seven, she would band cigars, and put them in cellophane. As a tween, she would work on customer lists, then later she went to trade shows. All that time spent in a cigar factory had an impact, imparting upon her a knowledge of Cuban slang that perplexed her friends. "These colloquial Spanish terms—my friends would say, 'How do you know that?'" she laughs. Read more
