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IN THE FIELD
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TOBACCO BUSINESS
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MAY
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JUNE
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17 ]
A
As you’ll read in this issue of
Tobacco Business
,
pipe tobacco is still very much a popular cat-
egory for retailers. The challenge, however, is
how to make pipe tobacco products even more
appealing in today’s market. Scandinavian To-
bacco Group Lane Ltd. (STG Lane) is a com-
pany that deals with that challenge on virtually
a daily basis.
Lane was founded in Dresden, Germany
in 1890. Since its early days, it has special-
ized in the highest quality pipe and roll-
your-own cigarette tobaccos. After Herman
G. Lane, one of the founder’s grandsons,
immigrated to the U.S. in 1938, Lane Ltd.
was re-established in Manhattan and began
manufacturing pipe tobaccos in New York
City. In 1983, production facilities were
moved to Tucker, Georgia.
Today, Lane Ltd. is part of Scandinavian
Tobacco Group, a company that specializes
in pipe tobacco, RYO and premium cigar
products. Leonard Wortzel, vice president
of marketing and product development, has
spent years marketing pipe tobacco products,
including STG Lane’s memorable Pipa pipe
tobacco starter kit that challenged how pipe
tobacco was typically marketed and seen at
the time of its release.
TB
met with Wortzel
recently to talk about how one can success-
fully market pipe tobacco products today,
and how to reach new pipe smokers in one of
tobacco’s oldest categories. The following are
excerpts from that conversation.
Tobacco Business
: What are your
tips for building an effective
marketing team?
Leonard Wortzel:
The first rule is to hire
somebody smarter than you. For us, I won’t
say that we’ve gravitated away from hiring
people with a tobacco background, but we
certainly expect a good marketer who can
bring a fresh look to the categories. In my
case, these are products I’ve been staring
at day in and day out for several years now.
It’s good to have somebody who hasn’t had
that initial exposure to tobacco as a market
who can come in and look at it as a consumer
[would] and be able to look at it in a different
way. Beyond all of the other things you’d gen-
erally want in an employee, a lot of it is hiring
somebody who can knock your company out
of its complacency in the way you’re used to
looking at things.
How can retailers best promote and
market pipe tobacco products to
consumers?
It’s a challenge because if you’re new to the
category, the product really doesn’t explain
itself. In an ideal world, you’ll have a very
knowledgeable staff. The No. 1 priority is
making sure that people know you sell pipe
An interview with Leonard Wortzel of Scandinavian Tobacco Group
INTERVIEW BY BEN STIMPSON
Promoting
PipeTobacco