By Natalie Lozano Trimble
Photography by Crystal Wise
Entrepreneurs are disruptors by definition, but three Fort Worth founders are making waves by breaking unwritten rules in the cigar and tuxedo industries: Al Micallef of Micallef Cigars, Houstoun Waring of Waring Tuxedos and Marcus Phillips of Rock & Chief Mobile Cigar Lounge.
Micallef’s journey into the cigar industry started with a broken-down car. He was sitting at the Silver Leaf Cigar Lounge in downtown Fort Worth when a car belonging to cigar makers in the Gomez Sanchez family stopped working.
He ended up inviting the family to stay in town, fed them at Reata, which he owns, and later asked if they would make him 1,200 cigars. The blend they created, he says, ranked in the top 25 in Cigar Aficionado magazine in 2018. “No one does that the first year,” he says.
Micallef asked the Gomez Sanchez family if they would work for him, which led to buying a factory in Nicaragua, where Micallef Cigars are rolled by hand today.
Micallef, 83, has almost 70 years of entrepreneurial stories and experiences to share. At 14, he and a friend opened a dance lounge dedicated to the twist near their Detroit high school. Between snacks, drinks and a small cover charge, they made $30,000, six times what Micallef’s father was making each year.
He was also 14 when he taught himself to read. While Micallef says he probably had some kind of learning disability, it helped him as an entrepreneur. “I approach things in a much different way than most people do,” he says.
When Micallef moved his silicone manufacturing company from Michigan to Weatherford, he worked with city leaders to secure federal grants to build the needed infrastructure.
As the company grew, Micallef sought additional help, but his impact was in doubt on the then-population of 14,000 people. In response, he paid his entire $140,000 payroll in $2 bills.
“Everywhere I went, the $2 bills had inundated that city,” Micallef says. “We proved to them that the economics, you know, were very important to Weatherford.”
Decades later, Micallef says the biggest challenge he faces is recessions. “Our company picnics are the scariest time for me because I’ll see four or five hundred people, and I know that they rely on decisions that I make,” Micallef says.
Micallef’s daughter and the Vice-President of Marketing, Amanda Micallef, says doing things outside traditional expectations was all she knew. “There’s no way I would have gone off to California to get in the movie business if not for him encouraging us to all look at what we wanted to do and what we were passionate about.”
After more than 20 years of working first in the film industry and then helping brands create compelling short-form video content, she decided to come back to work for and with her father in 2019. “He was still active in the businesses enough that there would be years to spend with him,” she says.
Amanda Micallef doesn’t sound like she grew up in a small Texas town. She says people used to confuse her with her late mother, Jane, on the phone because they sounded so much alike. Both of her parents grew up in Michigan and met there.
Micallef says he built a crystal radio kit as a child, and the only station he could get was in Del Rio. “My parents really couldn’t convince me that I lived in Michigan,” he says and moving to Texas became his plan. Years later, after he and Jane settled here, she pointed out that he never asked her if she wanted to move to Texas. “It never entered my mind. Who wouldn’t want to go to Texas?”
Thinking outside the box impacted how MC names their cigars. Traditional names for cigar blends are in Spanish, Micallef says, and the average cigar smoker has trouble remembering the name of what they like. MC has a color series with names like black, green, and white, for example, with new ones released every year.
Cigar making is not a quick process. From seed to store is three to four years, Dan Thompson, the MC Company President, says, with much of that time spent drying and fermenting the tobacco leaves to remove the natural ammonia.
The company also does draw testing, which involves pulling air through a cigar to confirm there are no blockages, a form of quality control that not every manufacturer practices.
Their approach to pricing and response to post-pandemic inflation are other ways they have set themselves apart from competitors. The pandemic brought an uptick in cigar sales, and inflation in 2021 allowed competitors to increase their premium prices significantly; however, MC decided to offer its color series in the $7 to $9 range, while also adding premium cigars with Spanish names and prices in the $20 to $40 range.
The diversity has paid off. Last year, Thompson says, the company grew about 42% and was up 50% in the first quarter of 2026.
Thompson says defying expectations around distribution has helped keep prices low. Unlike the alcohol industry, which has a network of distributors, cigar brands have to build relationships with individual retailers, which takes time. Some retailers initially expected a salesperson on site every 60 days, and Thompson says minimizing their visits has helped keep costs down.
When retailers or consumers ask about T-shirts or ashtrays, Thompson’s response is simple: “We’re not in the swag business,” he says. But he does offer to increase the price in exchange for those items — if it’s a trade they’re willing to make. So far, the answer is always no.
Micallef Cigars are available for purchase at Reata downtown, or head to their website to find a local retailer.
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The phrase smoking jacket might conjure up an image of gentlemen in velvet robes smoking cigars while playing cards or billiards, says Houstoun Waring of Waring Tuxedos. But historically, it was a tuxedo that was associated with cigar smoking.
“After dinner you’d smoke,” Waring says, explaining that the two are so ubiquitous, in French a tuxedo is called “un smoking.”
At the Fort Worth Public Library Foundation’s annual Cigar Smoker held at the Fort Worth Club in May, some people opted for the velvet jacket with their black-tie, while others wore a velvet jacket with jeans and boots, but most were smoking while wearing what Waring calls the Fort Worth uniform: a sports coat, jeans and boots.
Waring, 36, doesn’t keep velvet jackets in stock at his tuxedo rental and custom clothing shop located on the bricks on Camp Bowie. But he does offer them made-to-order, and is one of the only local retailers selling classic opera pumps and the Albert slipper, a velvet slipper popularized by Prince Albert, from Bowhill and Elliott of Norwich, England.
“In some ways, having a brick-and-mortar location with inventory and tailoring on site has been the historical norm,” Waring says. “Today, success within that model requires thinking outside the box.”
The emphasis is on inventory. At other tuxedo rentals, everything is off-site, but Waring’s business model allows him to do same-day services. “If somebody comes in two hours before their wedding, I could get a tux done for them.”
Waring says some customers are surprised at how reasonable the cost is, too. Some competitors start at a low rate but upcharge for details like studs and cufflinks, which he includes with his rental package.
Many customers either have never rented a tux or haven’t worn one in years, and Waring says he often needs to clarify the dress code. “If it’s black tie optional, they want you to be in a tuxedo,” he says.
A native of New Orleans who moved to Texas with his family after Hurricane Katrina, Waring also curates custom clothing and men’s gifts alongside his rentals.
“I enjoy sourcing fabrics and choosing the best factories I can find to produce clothing from them,” he says. While he offers products made in Italy using Italian or English textiles, Waring also has dinner jackets made start-to-finish in America at a factory in New York with fabric made in Connecticut using sheep wool from Montana and Wyoming, and with Buffalo nickel buttons on the sleeve. Waring Tuxedos is located at 4709 Camp Bowie Boulevard and is open Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
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Marcus Phillips’ first time smoking a cigar wasn’t an experience he wanted to repeat. He and his wife were on a cruise, and he got sick as a dog, then didn’t touch another one for ten years.
When friends invited him for a smoke two years ago, he discovered the appeal.
After spending time at lounges, he noticed some had assigned seats or unwritten rules about what cigars you should be smoking.
Phillips created the Rock & Chief Mobile Cigar Lounge to “[make] it comfortable for everybody to be able to relax and feel free about smoking […] whatever cigar that you wanted to smoke.”
The trailer has a humidor with cigars for purchase and seating inside, as well as an option for chairs to set up next to the trailer under an awning. When the cigar experience needs to stay inside the closed trailer, Phillips estimates he can fit about 15 people. “It depends on how well they like each other, I guess,” he says.
Phillips and his wife, Raquel, are the namesakes behind Rock & Chief. He has called his wife “Rock” since they were dating, and his own nickname as an outside linebacker for Pittsburgh State University in Kansas was “Big Chief.”
The cigar lounge is not his first business. Phillips has been in lawn services for 22 years, and he and his wife both work for American Airlines part-time. On a recent weekend, he mowed lawns on Thursday, set up at the Rare Steak Championship in Las Colinas Thursday night, mowed more lawns Friday and Saturday and then worked Sunday at AA.
In the first 18 months, Phillips, a Kansas native, has taken the lounge to Dallas, Houston, Galveston and Tulsa, Oklahoma, and says every area has different preferences, though there are a few cigars that do well in every market.
Friends have asked if he is ever going to dress up, but his goal is to make people feel comfortable. His customers are a mix of people who have been curious but never ventured into a lounge before and those who already smoke and are surprised to see his mobile lounge out and about.
In September, the lounge will join The Burn Shop, a metal fabricator specializing in custom grills and fire pits, for a block party in Wichita Falls. The two vendors met as neighbors at the Fort Worth Food + Wine Festival.
It was Phillips who reached out to the FWFWF about setting up his lounge during the event. “I don’t feel intimidated by it because I put so much time and effort and passion into it,” Phillips says. “I have a really great product.”
On June 6, they’ll be back at Clearfork for a Porsche event, followed by a trip east for the Dallas Greek Picnic. Head to their website, rocknchiefcigarlounge.com, to set up a rental.