The OZ Family story begins not with a cigar, but with a meerschaum pipe. Cano Aret Ozgener, a first-generation Armenian Turk, immigrated to America in 1961 to attend Columbia University on a scholarship, where he met his future wife Esen Sever. They married and settled in Nashville, Tennessee, where Cano — a natural tinkerer — began modifying meerschaum pipes from his home basement and stamping them with his initials: C.A.O. Humidors and cigars followed, and the Ozgeners launched CAO cigars in 1995 — a brand that became a hit with striking, non-traditional packaging and blends that reached more than 40 states and 60 countries. By the time the family sold CAO in 2007, Tim Ozgener had grown the company's revenues from $5 million to $25 million as its president. After the sale, the family channeled that same creative energy into a different kind of art — converting the former CAO headquarters in Nashville into OZ Arts, a contemporary performance and installation space.
When the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, Tim reflected on his family's heritage and their place in the cigar industry — and felt inspired to return. In 2022, he launched OZ Family Cigars, with his first lines crafted in homage to the family's Turkish heritage — and the Bosphorus line immediately achieved the highest vertical rating in the Ozgener family's long history in the industry. The brand won the 2022 New Company of the Year award from Halfwheel in its debut year, a remarkable achievement for a boutique operation built from scratch. Today, OZ Family's tightly curated portfolio — the pepper-forward box-pressed Bosphorus, the San Andrés Maduro Aramas, the Connecticut Shade Firsat, and the Sumatra-wrapped Karatoba — reads like a blender's personal journal: each line a distinct statement, each blend a deliberate expression of Tim Ozgener's 40-plus years of accumulated tobacco knowledge and his family's unmistakable Nashville-meets-Istanbul story.
