Were almost full

We've been open for a couple of hours now.  There is a lot of pent up demand for a nice Cigar store in Fremont.  People have come in saying they have been waiting a long time for something like this.  Not sure how many people have been by.  I do know the lounge has been busy all day with only a couple of chairs available.

We have also sold about 1/2 of our lockers on day 1 (Reality is we all took one so 6 were already gone).  If you want to get a locker to store Cigars and other things in then you better move fast.

WE'RE OPEN

We've been open for about an hour and forty minutes now.

Before the sign was flipped people started walking in!

We have our initial Herf Club member.  This is a great program that allows you to try new cigars and expand your range of tastes.  Similar to a Wine Club where every month we will pick a different cigar and peel the label off and have a blind tasting with the Herf Club members.

The lounge is also being worked out.  People sitting around trading life stories at the table

And some others are just enjoying a nice comfortable place to smoke and read a good book.

I'll keep blogging the day.

Almost thtere....

Open in 1 1/2 DAYS on April 20th!!!

There are lots of things happening right now. Brad Knipstein  is here taking professional pictures of the lounge and store.  If you have $40K+ of camera gear and know what you're doing you can take a good picture.

All of our employees are on board now.  We went through training today on operational procedures. Getting READY.

We are putting pricing on all the cigars and doing
last minute updates to our inventory.  Every Cigar should have a nice clear label of Who makes it, what the blend is, what the country of origin is and the shape and size.





And the blinds got installed today.  They look nice and make it possible to watch the game in the afternoon.

We also had Jeff Blevins from Esteban Carrera come in and introduce us to the their Cigar line.  They are a large boutique cigar manufacturer with their own factory that sold over a million sticks last year.  I tried a couple and really liked them.  They have a a wide range of flavors from nice smooth mild cigars to my favorite the Police Line of 211, 5150 to the 187 with a little punch.

Stop by this weekend and enjoy a  fantastic smoke.

Grand opening is still on track for May 11th.  There are several moving parts we still need to nail down but I think this is going to be an epic weekend.

Done! Now all we have to do is open

The lounge is ready, the cigars are coming in and going into the humidors.  All we need to do now is inventory several thousand cigars and get them into our Point Of Sale System (cash register) so we can start selling things.  


We open on April 20th!


Grand opening is still a little up in the air.  Last blog I said it was May 4th we may have to slip some.  Several Cigar Manufacturers have let us know they want to participate in the Grand Opening.  So we are going to have to juggle schedules a little.


It has been a busy week at the OCL (Ohlone Cigar Lounge).  Last weekend the entire crew including Art our manager was in on Friday and Saturday setting up the lounge, getting the humidors delivered and set up and in general getting ready to open.  This past week we got our big cigar order from JMG cigars and started stocking the humidors.

I also had a chance to finally meet face to face George of Rodrigo Cigars.  He had a similar idea but a different twist than us.  He decided to go create his own cigar line.  I got to try a couple with George and WOW.  What a great cigar. I feel lucky we get to carry the Rodrigo brand.  The La Fortaleza is a perfect smoke for me.  Strong and lots of flavor, great construction and burns well.  You can see a nice review on Puff.com or A Cigar Smoker.  If you want to try one of these in California you have to visit the Ohlone Cigar Lounge.


The lounge looks great.  Jeff did a great job with getting the proper mood and paying attention to the details.  The color scheme and lighting really make this feel like a comfortable place to hang out.














In the background you can see the lockers we will sell memberships for and two of the chairs.  Like this picture because you can see the how well the colors go together and what the furniture looks like.  It's too bad you can feel things over the web and see how comfy these chairs are.

The Lounge From Mowry

Bar with Lockers in the Background

This is the bar.  We don't' have a liquor license.  As soon as we open we are going to try and get one.  Fremont has this ability to get a Conditional Use Permit.  Basically they define how you can do things that are outside of what is normal.  Like having a drink in a Cigar Lounge.  You won't be able to come in off the street and drink but if you buy a cigar and want to have a beer or scotch with it why not.  Lets hope the City understands the distinction.  Notice there is a TV move the bar.  Right now there are 3 TVs in the lounge.  We expect to have one on if any but during football season We'll have the NFL package from DirecTV.  We also had foresight to pull extra TV runs through the walls so we can easily add 2 more TVs into the lounge.  Something I'll argue we should do during football season. 

Back Wall

These are the chairs along the back row with nice mood lighting. we had a lot of discussions about having a small couch or English 2 Seater (love seat) and decided individual chairs are probably a better fit.   

You get a great feel for the whole lounge in this picture.  It is a 60" TV along the right wall.  We wanted to go bigger but all the research we did showed this was the prefect size for the distance we have.

 As I said before we are now starting to get our Cigar, Pipe and accessories into the store and stocking them.  Hopefully you get a sense of how large our selection will be.  And we are looking for any recommendations of a smoke you like and want to make sure we carry.  We have both distributors and direct connections so we can get almost any brand out there.  Just send us an e-mail.