The Idea of the Stinky Cigar Ashtray:

Stinky got his name from his wife when he started smoking cigars and came into the house with that familiar odor. Now, he’s Stinky to thousands of fellow cigar enthusiasts.

We needed bigger ashtrays!

The ashtrays would fill up so quickly with ash, cigar butts, matches, wrappers, and more. Nobody wanted to empty the small cigarette ashtrays.

The first Stinky Cigar Ashtray was a secondhand silver plated bowl that I had for years. I noticed the deep size of the bowl and thought, “This could hold all of our ash, so we would not have to dump it out during our Herf.“

The bowl, however, did not have any way of holding the cigars on it.

I remembered something.

We lived close to the railroad tracks, and my children always brought back flattened coins that they would put on the tracks for the train to run them over (I remember doing the same thing as a child). I found an arcade with a souvenir coin machine that flattened a quarter. I made 3 flattened quarters and took them home, drilled a big hole in a 2×4, cut it in half and placed the coin(s) in the curve and used a broom stick and a hammer to bend the coin. They had the right curve and would hole a Cigar perfectly!

I figured it out!

Now, I just need a way to attach them to the bowl. In January of 2004, I took three flattened coins to a radiator shop and had them soldered to the rim of the bowl.

I brought the custom made cigar bowl to our next Herf, and the guys loved it and wanted me to make some for them (I just brought it because I didn’t want to keep dumping ashtrays). It was a lot of work to make that first ashtray, so I said no at first. Each week they kept telling me that I should make a large bowl ashtray like the one I bring to our Herf.

With all the compliments and encouragement, it occurred to me that there might be a need for a large size cigar ashtray in the market. Out of curiosity, I contacted a company in India and started researching the idea.

In March of 2004

 I attended the NATO convention here in Las Vegas. I only had the original Silver-plated ashtray and one makeshift stainless-steel prototype. I was only showing this new cigar ashtray concept. It was only a hand-made mockup and I asked every cigar store owner or manager what they thought it would sell for in their shop if it was made of stainless steel. With their retail pricing averaging about $30.00, I decided to order samples from the factory. The samples arrived just in time for the RTDA convention in July 2004. An SBA consultant suggested that I show the factory samples and take pre-orders before ordering a (very expensive) container shipment.

At the convention, cigar store owners loved this new over-sized stainless steel ashtray so much, they agreed to sign preorders. By the end of the convention, there were enough pre-orders for almost half of a container shipment. I placed the order with the factory and the first shipment arrived on October 30, 2004. I shipped to all the pre-orders and they had the new Stinky Cigar Ashtray the first week of November . . . just in time for the Christmas season.

That’s how the Original Stinky Cigar Ashtray was born.