TOB_Magazine

[ 72 ] TOBACCO BUSINESS [ MAY / JUNE | 18 ] M Most about-to-be-married couples busy themselves debating which caterer to use or where to go on their honeymoon. Not Gary and Barbara Kolesaire, who decided to start their marriage and their own business at roughly the same time. “We were about to be married, and I mentioned to the guy who owned the shop, ‘If you ever want to sell…,” recounts Gary, a pipe smoker who had been frequenting The Tobacco Shop of Ridgewood since he was a freshman in college. “We’ve been married 39 years now and have owned the store for 38.” Initially, the duo entrusted the business to a day manager, spend- ing Saturdays and two evenings a week in the shop learning the ins and outs of running a retail store with a specialty in pipes and pipe tobaccos. That was back in 1979, and, while the Kolesaires have been through their share of ups and downs in the decades since, today the business is stronger than ever. “We went through every nightmare a retailer goes through,” Gary reports cheerfully. “Our rent was tripled, competitors came in, taxes went up—you name it, we faced it.” The Kolesaires managed to meet every challenge through a combi- nation of careful accounting (Barbara) and creative problem solving (Gary). When the rent on their well-situated shop skyrocketed unex- pectedly, they signed the new lease but also leaped into action, looking for a suitable new home for their business and finding it in an unlikely spot—a small space just 100 feet away that the proprietor of an adja- cent dress shop offered to sell them. Gary Kolesaire had the vision to recognize what few would have— that this 500-square-foot space could be turned into a beautiful little shop showcasing cigars, pipes and pipe tobacco. Doing so meant eschewing the time-honored practice of showcasing cigars in their branded boxes and risking the ire of sales reps in the process, but he persevered. A practiced woodworker, Kolesaire enlisted the help of his coppersmith father to design and build cigar racks capable of display- ing 100 sizes of cigars in the tiny space. The Little Shop that Could In 1993, the Kolesaires were able to purchase an additional 1,000 square feet of the building. This enabled them to introduce one of the first lounges in the country, situated on the mezzanine level. The design was intended to “incorporate what an American thinks he’ll see in London—and, of course, you don’t see this design in London either,” ➤ Living the D r e a m Lots of tobacco shop customers muse about what it would be like to run their favorite cigar haunts. Thirty-eight years ago, Gary and Barbara Kolesaire decided to find out. BY JENNIFER GELFAND RETAILER The Tobacco Shop of Ridgewood’s Davidoff Lounge was the fourth to open in the U.S. Photo courtesy of The Tobacco Shop of Ridgewood