High Roller: Passions, Life, and Luxury With Gurkha Cigar Group’s Kaizad Hansotia

Kaizad Hansotia is a hardcore dude. It’s apparent even before you meet the man.

Transiting the halls of Gurkha Cigar Group’s South Florida headquarters is akin to navigating a Claes Oldenburg-scale collection of Gurkha’s baroque cigar boxes.

En route to Hansotia’s private lounge, the corridors and spaces are redolent of sweet tobacco, exotic wood, and vintage vibe. Emotionally warm, thematically rich, and inviting above all, simply walking the grounds is a case study in contemporary decadence.

All of it embodies Hansotia’s vision of enduring quality and compelling beauty. As the Chairman and Founder of Gurkha, a prolific collector of fine goods, and a creative force who draws inspiration from all quarters, Hansotia has unified his passion and profession into a seamless cognac-infused continuity.

“Consider art and business as companions. We changed the dynamics of the cigar industry starting in 1989. For example, before Gurkha, everything was shipped in the same indifferent cardboard boxes.

“With price and presentation, we took a risk and got the consumer’s attention, but the product within the boxes had to speak for itself. In the end, a luxury product must be extraordinary, or you’re just posturing.”

And Kaizad Hansotia knows the modern luxury goods customer.

From his business roots as the 1980s U.S. grey-market source of Seiko, Citizen, and Swatch timepieces to his current status as a collector of iconic Swiss watch maisons, Hansotia’s journey reads like a roadmap for channeling boyhood dreams into adulthood realities. The notion cuts to the very core of Hansotia’s philosophy of collecting and his lifelong pursuits.

To hear him describe his views on the origins of personal passions is to steal a glimpse into a mind that fixes on an idea and pursues it to exhaustion.

“If you’re a collector, it’s in your pedigree, it’s in your DNA. The interests start early – I know they did in my case. If you’re drawn towards fine cigars, swords, pens, watches, or cars, you’ll feel that long before you can afford them, and when you can, the collections start.

“Regardless of what it is a man loves, the early origin of consuming interests is a common thread between collectors. I build every collection based on my personal ‘bucket list’ for that category. I think that the more you learn about a topic, the more focused your collecting becomes. Goals become a factor, and it becomes a journey.”

Hansotia’s personal preference for swords, firearms, and luxury watches traced precisely this arc. From early dalliances with Rolex watches and pen knives, his inclinations and targets grew in parallel with the success of Gurkha.

“Pen knives are where I started… eventually, I owned an extensive collection of significant Japanese swords, with full Yoshikawa papers – always with papers. But jargon aside, the most important feature of any collection, luxury or otherwise, is that the collector truly enjoys it. There’s a powerful emotional side to collecting, and fun is the bottom line.”

Fun is also a business asset and a tie that binds. The ability to relate to men of passionate pastimes is a key feature of Hansotia’s business acumen and enduring success with Gurhka.

“If you’re into the boy’s toys – cars, watches, knives, cigars – you can relate to others who feel the same dedication. This is what puts us together at Gurkha; it’s fundamentally about our tobacco collection as a leveler that takes people from disparate backgrounds and binds them on common ground.”

“When I go to the high-end tobacco gatherings, I’m able to step right in and join the discussions. And when I do, I’ll see a doctor speaking with two Hell’s Angels chatting with a long-haul trucker, a plumber, and pack of attorneys. The common cause puts them on the same page, talking smoke, notes on the palate, burn, tobacco age, and taste. It’s a luxury, true, but it’s also a magnificent leveler and common cause.”

Staying permanently plugged into the luxury scene keeps Hansotia in touch with his clientele, and his degree of engagement plays directly into his R&D process.

Type his name into YouTube, and the depth of Kaizad Hansotia’s devotion to connoisseur communities becomes apparent. Now chief brand ambassador and Chairman at Gurkha, Hansotia relinquished his CEO functions specifically to focus on developing Gurkha’s products and public profile. Incidentally, that involves a great deal of engagement with the cigar enthusiast public.

Hansotia acknowledges that his tastes in tobacco often place him at odds with the mainstream market, so he splits production between blends “by popular demand” and those “for me and close friends, often those who are seeking the same type of investment-grade watches, for example.”

Investment-grade watches. Reference the haute horlogerie, and Hansotia’s eyes visibly widen. With every inch the enthusiasm of his hypothetical youthful initiate, the man relates his journey from Rolex to Patek Philippe, and he shares insights into the global phenomenon of ultra-luxury watch growth.

Still a devotee of Rolex, Hansotia wears a yellow gold GMT-Master II daily driver. He notes that the Rolex GMT in all of its iterations remains among his lifelong favorites – and he’s owned them all. But he actively shops Panerai, Breguet, and Patek these days. Hansotia explains how collector horizons have broadened with emerging-market prosperity and the dawn of a global economy.

“Initially, for me, it was about Rolex, which I still enjoy. But as I was exposed to new models, brands, and I learned more about horology, I began to see that there are expensive watches, there are luxury watches, and there are investment-grade luxury watches. A Patek Philippe is timeless, and its value spans the spectrum from the emotional value to the sheer investment value; it’s compelling on both counts.”

“I have friends and clients who have discovered this as well. In China, in the Middle East, in India, luxury culture is gaining new sophistication as personal tastes evolve. Whereas the Indian executive of ten years ago was wearing a Rolex by default, today, he’s seeking the upgrade, the next level. It’s about status, true, but it’s also about value.”

Bullish projections of eastern markets have become the knock-knock jokes of the business sector: overused and tiresome. But Hansotia’s vision of luxury growth in new markets draws from equal measures of experience, foresight, and nuance.

He touts the increasing sophistication of the eastern luxury goods consumer as a harbinger of sustainable success. While acknowledging that traditional luxury brands such as Rolex and Mercedes-Benz still have room to grow, Hansotia hints at the coming bounty for purveyors of the ultra-premium and non-traditional totems of status; he is personally acquainted with the Indian market import authority in the $300,000+ USD bespoke timepiece sector, and business is booming.

In the automotive sphere, Hansotia points to Indian-owned Jaguar-Land Rover as an example of untapped potential in emerging luxury markets. “They were on the ropes in western markets, now their production is sold-out in India and China,” Hansotia explained.

“Through the Internet, we’ve all been exposed to unprecedented knowledge, and that fuels consumer sophistication. Today’s luxury consumer finally has the means the see the enduring value of hand-built watches, and, increasingly, he has the means to collect them. We’re seeing more millionaires and billionaires every year, and the Internet becomes an instant conduit to high-end watches, spirits, tobacco, you name it.”

The Internet. In many respects, its rise as a mainstream medium has created a feedback cycle that magnifies every social phenomenon it touches. With Gurhka, Hansotia rode the particle waves of the dotcom era to prominence that brick and mortar retail simply could not yield.

Today, he wrestles with the challenge of maintaining brand equity in a world of online discounting and unlimited pricing information.

Virtually all luxury products are available online, and it has changed the way consumers buy, sell, and shop for luxury goods. Gurkha splits its model lines between physical retail exclusives and editions that can be sold online. Keeping the faith with longtime brick-and-mortar retail partners is key, but Hansotia acknowledges that future growth throughout the luxury sector will be driven by online factors.

“This is the life we live now. Everyone is selling and buying on the Internet. It’s an audience of over 200 million, and it has forced a major metamorphosis in the way people get their information and make their purchase decisions. You have to fight to compete with the other voices in that arena.

“But the big picture outlook is good for luxury collectors and brands alike. It’s a growing market, and it will remain robust. Naturally, you have the new markets in the east.”

Still, the romanticism of traditional luxury bastions – the sword studios of Japan, hunting lodges of the U.S., and the watchmakers of Switzerland – retain a powerful pull on Hansotia’s heart. While it is easy to frame the growth of eastern luxury culture as a passing of the torch of prosperity, Florida-based Hansostia rebuffs any suggestion that luxury is a zero-sum game.

“I’m optimistic that traditional markets will grow as they welcome new players, because there’s been a sea change. Today’s western youths grow up acquainted with high standards through Internet exposure. They’re willing to spend more for quality. Millennials are demanding better food, enduring value in goods, and in many cases they’re starting earlier than their parents.”

From South Florida to India to YouTube and back, Hansotia covers a lot of ground. His facets define him; a connoisseur with a heart given to antiquity, a lover of life with his head in the moment; a businessman with both eyes on the future. And so very hardcore about it all.