78
TOBACCO BUSINESS INTERNATIONAL
JULY/AUGUST 2014
trench marketing
BY MICHAEL GELFAND
I
t’s natural for smaller retailers
to sometimes resent or envy the
existence of bigger competitors. A
better bet? Learn from your larger peers
in the business.
Cigars International is one of the
big boys who does things right. With
three stores located in and around the
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania area (two
in town, one in nearby Hamburg),
the company enjoys advantages that
other retailers would love. For starters,
they’re located in a tobacco-friendly
state, and their stores are all within
reasonable driving distance for tax-savvy,
metropolitan consumers in and around
New York City and Philadelphia.
Cigars International maximizes that
advantage with immense physical stores
and the buying power to fill all that
square-footage floor-to-rafters with
a breathtaking diversity of products.
And when you throw in that they’re
Google’s top-ranked online cigar retailer
(cigarsinternational.com), you’ve got
yourself a very serious competitor.
Size Is Irrelevant, Customer
Service Is Everything
Putting aside the inherent advantages
of scale, location and monetary resources,
the chain also does gangbuster business
thanks to, in large part, assets that
are just as available to mom-and-pop
stores—customer service and employee
education.
Joe Stracco, the general manager
of the chain’s Hamburg Super-Store
location, keyed in on customer service
as a cornerstone of the business before
he was even an employee. “I have been a
cigar smoker for over 40 years, and I was
a customer of Cigars International before
the original owners asked me if I wanted
part-time work six years ago,” he recalls.
Stracco quickly became a full-time
employee and then moved to corporate
headquarters last year, where he wrote
Big Kid on the Block
Cigars International leveraged Internet success to become
a brick-and-mortar powerhouse.
