Non-smoker Abhik Roy built Kolkata-based Andre Garcia into a global cigar case brand by fusing Spanish cedar interiors, Bavarian bull leather and buffalo horn caps. Assembled in India with imported materials, his patented designs challenge soft European leather cases, protect cigars in transit and navigate India’s restrictive online cigar sales through fragile hotel partnerships.
Andre Garcia does not sound like a company built in Calcutta [now Kolkata]. And that is deliberate. "We can't have a company that says Ganapati Exports or Laxmi Export," says founder Abhik Roy while in conversation with Robb Report India. "So we had to think of a name which is accepted on both sides of the town, in Europe and in the US." He and his brother settled on it over coffee in Boston: Diego Garcia for the battleship, and Andre for a name common across Europe.
Roy, though, is not a cigar smoker. "You will be very surprised to know I am not even a smoker," he says. His entry into the trade, by his account, began in 1998–99, "when we used to have those dial-up connections," reading about the cigar market out of curiosity. He comes from an academic Bengali family, and describes the pull toward cigars as one born of design fascination rather than personal taste.
Roy's business includes cigar cases as well, and not just cigars, though the company also produces its own blends. He says the traditional leather cases used by long-established European houses were too soft to protect their contents. "If you stand on the case, it will crush the cigars," he explains. His cases use Spanish cedar—Cedrela odorata—sourced, he says, from Brazil, spliced in Arkansas and assembled in India. "This is the gold standard for storing a cigar," he says, pointing to the wood's natural resistance to the insects that damage stored tobacco.
The signature touch is a cap of buffalo horn set into the top of each case, a detail Roy says had no precedent in the trade. "Nobody in the entire history ever thought of putting a buffalo horn on a cigar case," he claims. He also claims to hold an Indian patent for cigar case design, and says he has taken legal action over copied designs.
He describes the production process as a deliberate marriage of imported material and traditional craft. "I combine today's technology with artisans who built the Taj Mahal!" he says. "A person turning the leather or moving the leather on the case has to be old school. It can't be done in a machine." The leather, he says, is Bavarian bull hide; the carbon fibre used in some models is imported, as is Italian leather worked into others. "None of the product I use is made in India. We are only assembling it in India."
Asked to name a favourite from his own range, he points to the carbon fibre case for its rarity. "How many people make a cigar case with carbon fibre? Only we do it!" he claims. Others in the line include the Pack and Go, prized for its functionality, and the Saint James, built with a compartment for cutters and lighters and pitched at golfers.
The case business, Roy says, is shaped as much by India's regulatory landscape as by craft. Online sale of cigars is not legal in India, he notes, and Andre Garcia currently sells through hotel partnerships rather than direct retail—a channel, he describes, as ‘fragile’ given how frequently hotel personnel are transferred between properties. "Every vice president and general manager gets reposted, and you start all over again," he says. It is, in effect, the same problem he set out to solve with the case itself: building something durable in a market that keeps shifting under it.
Roy is unsentimental about the mix of effort and circumstance behind the business's survival. "It will be dishonest to say it was hard, but it was also not very easy," he says. "Some blessing has to be there." He recounts gifting a box of cigars to politicians, a friendship with renowned filmmakers, or even crafting custom orders for CFOs. In each, the constant is the case, not just the cigar.
Twenty-six years in, Roy still doesn't smoke. He has just made sure everyone else's cigars arrive in better shape than they left the factory.