Tobacco Business

Often referred to as the “World’s Largest Cigar Store,” JR Cigar built its business around the initiative of offering customers the best possible retail experience and a variety of products offered at the best prices. To achieve this goal, the company has used tools to help its staff better understand their customer base, and the company hasn’t been afraid to change or tweak its business strategy to match the times. During the 1970s and 1980s, JR Cigar focused on building its catalog business and offering its customers regular big, flashy sales. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the focus shifted to e-commerce and later to social media to take the business to new markets and to connect with both new and established cigar smokers. “As we have grown over the years, there have been challenges, of course, but the more we grew the easier some of these challenges became,” says Nick Libretti, JR Cigar’s brand manager. “When it comes to pricing, for example, we buy in much larger quantities than your standard store. This offers us a chance to purchase these products at a lower cost and to pass that savings on to the customer. Name recognition has also been key. Being known as the ‘World’s Largest Cigar Store’ automatically puts an idea in a consumer’s head that we are an industry leader, which increases brand awareness. However, even at this larger scale, we still make sure to listen to every customer and give them a personal, one-on-one experience.” Achieving success in tobacco retail is a challenge and an accomplishment that doesn’t happen overnight. For JR Cigar, it’s a 50-year success story of a tobacconist that dreamed big and worked hard year after year to create a retail operation that, despite its age, remained every bit relevant and competitive after five decades of being in business. The story of JR Cigar isn’t just a personal success story; it serves as a lesson that being a tobacconist and working in retail is a long game that if played right will lead to big gains over time. Scaling the Business The story of JR Cigar begins on March 10, 1970, when Lew Rothman opened the doors to his new retail store on Sixth Avenue and 46th Street in New York City. Rothman saw the success that local grocery stores had with selling cigars and decided to open his own store that specialized in cigars. Named after his father, Jack Rothman, JR Cigar became a destination for consumers seeking out different cigar brands like Te-Amo and Bering. The first sale that Rothman made was for a 10-pack of Tijuana Smalls Aromatic cigars, a tipped-cigar that sold for 29 cents a pack. While that price seems more than a bargain by today’s standards, Rothman quickly found that he was losing customers to competitors who could find their cigars sold for cheaper prices at other tobacconists. In a short span of time, Rothman taught himself about pricing and transformed JR Cigar into a high-volume discount store. Rothman began purchasing overruns and factory seconds from cigar manufacturers and pushed them hard in his store. Within half a year, JR Cigar became a destination for cigar consumers who knew they were going to get the best deals in the city from Rothman and his store. Like any tobacconist, Rothman adjusted his strategy as time progressed in order to stay ahead of his competitors. He started purchasing cigars from factories based in Miami, Florida, expanding his store’s offerings from overruns to an inventory of exotic brands that were exceptional while remaining a bit under the radar, including [ T O B A C C O B U S I N E S S . C O M ] TOBACCO BUSINESS [ 39 ]