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TOBACCO BUSINESS INTERNATIONAL
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The success story of Mary Lynn Kane and her husband Don
Kane, owners of Lake Country Cigars in Delafield, Wiscon-
sin, is a study in the power of presentation as a fundamen-
tal of marketing. The story begins in 1992, when the Kanes
were in a waiting room and came across one of the first issues
of
Cigar Aficionado
. At that time Don Kane had been a sales
engineer for a mechanical contractor for nearly 30 years, and
Mary Lynn worked in business-to-business marketing.
“Actually, we just saw the pretty pictures and said, ‘This
is beautiful; look at how they're presenting smoking the ci-
gars,’” says Mary Lynn Kane. “So we said, ‘Let’s go get one.’
We went and got one and, I would say, within a week and
a half we both had our own humidors, and we were both
buying our own cigars.”
Neither of the Kanes were smokers before that experi-
ence. Yet something clicked for both of them, changing the
course of their lives.
“One of the things that we had talked about as we were
smoking cigars was, ‘Wouldn’t this be a great business to
have in our life?’” she recounts. “And Don was getting sick
of the business he was in. So I said, ‘I love small business,
let’s go for it.’
“We decided to open a store in the Lake Country area,
which is a very affluent area where people have a lot of dis-
cretionary income. Space became available in a strip mall
in a very desirable location, so we actually pulled the trigger
about a year earlier than we wanted.”
The year was 1998 and, at the time, neither of them had
any retail experience. modeled their shop after a store that
they had frequented.
“We had a soft opening, and then we went to the IPCPR
show,” says Kane, who says that the $8,000 the couple spent
to stock their shop seemed like a big investment at the time. “It
made us nervous because we’d already made our purchases
for the humidor before we saw all the new products. As new
business owners, you don’t know what you’re getting into.”
This is the part of the story where we tell you about the
lean, early years, but the Kanes skipped that phase. “Early on
Lake
Country
Cigars:
Thriving
Under a
Woman’s
Touch
Event marketing and
a focus on service is a
winning combination for
this Wisconsin shop.
BY PETER BARRY
TRENCH
MARKETING
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PREMIUM
CIGARS