The Other Co-Founder: Sandro Gerber and the Friendship That Built Sivonte
By Sander Hamilton, Co-Founder of Sivonte
There's a part of the Sivonte story I haven't told yet, and it doesn't feel right to keep going without telling it.
Sivonte has two co-founders. I'm one of them. The other is Sandro Gerber, the founder of Caminovación, and one of the people my father Glen trusted most in this business.
If you know me only through what I've written so far, you'd be forgiven for thinking Sivonte was a one-person operation — a son trying to honor his father's work alone. The truth is more interesting than that, and more important, because it's the reason this brand exists at all.
A Friendship Measured in Years, Not Cigars
My dad spent over a decade in tobacco before Sivonte was even a possibility. During those years, he built a small network of people he trusted — growers, master rollers, importers, and a few partners who saw the industry the same way he did. Sandro was one of those partners. They worked together for many years, long before I was old enough to be on the factory floor.
What that meant in practice: Sandro wasn't someone who showed up after my dad passed away. He was already there. He had been there for years, talking blends with my father, walking the curing barns together, sharing the slow conversations that happen in this industry over coffee or a glass of rum at the end of a long day. The kind of friendship that develops between two people who care about the same craft and who've watched each other do good work.
By the time my dad introduced me to Sandro, the relationship between them was already a decade deep.
What Sandro Built — And What Glen Helped Build
Sandro is the founder of Caminovación, a Swiss-Dominican boutique cigar brand based in Switzerland with manufacturing in the Dominican Republic. The name itself — Caminovación — captures something about Sandro's approach: a path of innovation, but rooted in respect for tradition.
Caminovación was never a project Sandro built alone. My dad was part of it from early on. The blends, the philosophy, the standards — Glen's hands were in all of it, the same way they were in everything he touched. The two of them built Caminovación together as a friendship and a business at the same time, which is rarer than people realize.
The brand's identity reflects that partnership: Swiss precision meeting Dominican heritage. The Swiss side comes from Sandro and the Caminovación team — the standards, the discipline, the respect for the customer. The Dominican side came from Glen and the factory — the leaf, the craft, the tradition.
If you visit Caminovación's site today, you'll see Sivonte named as the manufacturing partner. That isn't marketing. It's the structure of the relationship: Caminovación is rolled in our factory in Puerto Plata. The same hands that hand-check Sivonte cigars also hand-check Caminovación cigars. The same standards apply.
The Conversation That Made Sivonte Real
When my father passed, I was left with the same dilemma a lot of people face when they lose someone who shaped their life: what do I do with what he taught me?
The blends he was working on — the unreleased ones, the formulations he'd been refining for months — were sitting in his notes and in my head. I knew them. I'd been there when he developed some of them. But knowing a blend isn't the same as having the standing to release it. You can't just put a name on a band and assume the world will take you seriously.
Sandro called me not long after.
The exact details of that conversation are private, but the substance was simple: he wanted to honor my father's work, he saw what I'd been trained for, and he wanted to make sure the blends my dad never got to release didn't disappear with him. He proposed that we build something together — a brand that would carry forward what Glen had been working on, with Sandro's experience and resources behind it and my training and proximity to the factory floor at the center of it.
That conversation is the reason Sivonte exists.
I want to be honest about what Sandro brought to this. I had the knowledge and the access. He had something I didn't have: standing. Years in this business under his belt. A reputation that growers and rollers respected. The ability to walk into a room and have people listen to him because they'd already worked with him for a decade.
A twenty-something founder, no matter how well-trained, doesn't get the benefit of the doubt that an established partner gets. With Sandro on board, Sivonte wasn't a kid trying to prove something. It was the continuation of work that two trusted people had already been doing together for years.
The Quiet Part Made Loud
I've avoided going too deep into the family side of how Sivonte came to be, and I'm going to keep it mostly private out of respect for everyone involved. But I'll say this much, because Sandro's role in the story makes it relevant:
When my father died, the natural assumption would have been that the work continued under the existing brand he'd built. That isn't what happened, for reasons that aren't mine alone to share. What I can say is that Sandro looked at the situation, looked at what my father had been training me to do, and made a decision to back the path that honored Glen's work going forward — with the blends he'd been developing, the standards he'd built, and the person he'd trained.
That kind of loyalty isn't common in this industry, or any industry. It's the reason I trust Sandro the way my dad trusted him.
How the Partnership Works
For the curious, here's how Sivonte and Caminovación operate as separate brands with shared roots:
Caminovación is Sandro's brand, with its own blends, its own customer base in Switzerland and across Europe, and its own identity. It was developed with my father's input and continues to be made in our factory.
Sivonte is the brand we built together to bring Glen's unreleased blends to life and to expand what's possible with the foundation he laid. The blends are different. The customer is different. The story is different.
The factory is the same. The standards are the same. The hands that hand-check every cigar are the same.
Sandro splits his time between Switzerland and the Dominican Republic. When he's in the DR, he's at the factory. When he's in Zurich, he's running Caminovación and the network of aficionados and entrepreneurs around the brand. We talk often, about blends, about logistics, about the long arc of what we're trying to build.
Why I'm Telling You This Now
A brand built by two people, one of whom spent years working with the founder's father, is a more honest story than what most cigar startups put in front of you. Most luxury cigar brands are built by marketers and financiers who fall in love with the category from a distance. That's fine — some of them make good products. But the ones with real depth almost always trace back to a relationship between people who actually did the work, and who keep doing it.
That's what Sivonte is. My father trained me. Sandro trained alongside my father for years. The two of us are doing this together because both of our paths lead back to the same source.
When you light a Sivonte, the blend was developed by a man who is no longer here, refined by his son and his closest friend in the business, and rolled in a factory where every cigar is checked three times by hand. That isn't marketing copy. That's the actual chain of custody.
I'll be writing more about specific blends, specific decisions, and specific cigars in the posts ahead. But I wanted to make sure that anyone reading this knows there are two of us behind this brand — and that one of the names you should know, alongside mine, is Sandro Gerber.
Until next time, smoke slow.
— Sander
Sander Hamilton is the co-founder of Sivonte Cigars. He worked alongside his father, Glen, in the Dominican Republic for three years before founding Sivonte with Sandro Gerber to bring Glen's unreleased blends to aficionados worldwide. Explore the collection.