A country club ballroom at Christmas, black-tie guests behind and his rolling table in front

Corporate events

Everyone stands with the people they arrived with. Until the table opens.

He sets up where you tell him to and rolls without stopping for as long as you have him. There is a queue inside ten minutes, and every guest leaves holding a cigar that was made in front of them — with your logo on the band.

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1 of ~28 Opus X rollers—Arturo Fuente since 1995—Official roller · F1 Miami—Published in Cigar Journal—A quarter century at the table—Rolled for Hublot—

Who has brought him in

Hublot has flown him in four times.

FourHublotevenings,WoodfordReserve,andtheFormula1MiamiGrandPrix.
Las Vegas, a black-tie night, Geneva Seal in Chicago, and one across the border in Canada. Woodford Reserve. Eric Church’s band, in front of twenty thousand people at Saratoga. And the official cigar roller of the Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix.

Charles Barkley, Indianapolis.

What happens at the table

Half your guests have never met. Waiting for a cigar is the only thing that puts them shoulder to shoulder.

Guests standing around his long table at dusk, under string lights — Philadelphia, October 2024

Franklin rolling, close up, with guests standing and string lights behind — The pair of hands they are all watching

An open bar does not do it — people take a drink back to the group they came with. A queue does, because you stand in it next to whoever is next to you, watching the same pair of hands, for four or five minutes. That is longer than most conference introductions last.

The band

Everybody knows where the branded water bottle ends up.

A green and gold cigar band with a crest and a monogram, printed for one of his events — A band printed for one of his events

One of his cigars with the blue Hublot band, in front of the watches on display — A band printed for a brand

He rolls the cigar in front of your guest, and the band that goes on it is yours — printed with your mark, in gold. It goes into an inside pocket and gets smoked three weeks later, somewhere else, by someone who reads the band before they light it.

Tell him the date and the room, and you will have a proposal.

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Rooms he has worked

A rooftop. A country club at Christmas. A boardroom dinner in a historic mansion.

The station is dressed for the room it is going into, and it has gone into most of them.

Where it lands, and what he needs

He works to the hour you give him.

The reception

People are arriving and nobody has been introduced yet. The table gives the early ones something to do that is not their phone.

After the speeches

The room has been listening for forty minutes and wants to move. This is where most hosts put him.

The end

Whoever is still there at eleven is the reason you booked the room. They stay longer with something to stand around.

What he needs from the venue

A table, and air.

A table

Six feet is plenty. Everything that goes on it travels with him.

Air

A terrace, a courtyard or a covered doorway — and by that hour that is where your guests want to be anyway.

Cover, if the forecast turns

A marquee or a doorway. The table needs shade, not sun.

The part that matters to whoever signs

One client has had him back every year for ten years.

Franklin rolling under the marquee, at the Cleveland event — Cleveland, ten years with the same client

The table set up in a private hall, the second event of the same Saturday — Two events, one Saturday

An evening either goes well or it does not get repeated, so the only verdict worth reading is the second booking. In May he worked two events on the same Saturday, in two states.

200+ reviews

What people write afterwards.

Not one of them mentions the cigar first. They mention him — and eight of them, eight years apart, reach for the same word.

Franklin sat down with my wife and I and enjoyed a cigar with us. He treated us like family and gave us hugs on our way out. Papo is the real deal with a heart of gold and a sense of humor that can make anyone laugh.
Robert Kinnane