Tobacco Business

far more than just a traditional brick-and-mortar retailer—it was now a wholesale supplier to other tobacco retailers. JR Cigar went from obscurity to being a force of its own, and the company was featured in the pages of Consumer Reports , The New York Times and many New York-centric travel books. Rothman was a businessman who always strived for more and didn’t operate within normal limits. In the 1980s, though he had a successful retail and wholesale business, Rothman grew JR Cigar with the addition of new stores in Manhattan. Later, he expanded JR Cigar to newmarkets outside of New York City, opening up franchises in Detroit; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia and Dallas—and he even went international by opening a location in Tel Aviv, Israel. Once JR Cigar was much more than just a store, Rothman opened a new home office in Tuxedo, New York, where four employees worked and fulfilled all the company’s mail-order calls. Rothman also set his sights on the catalog market early on in his retail career by starting a JR Cigar catalog in 1971 and adding a bit of his own humor into the pages of JR Cigar’s catalog that went out to smokers in all 50 states. By 1987, business was booming, and JR Cigar was beginning to outgrow its home offices in New York, prompting it to move to a much larger facility in Fairfield, New Jersey. The new facility was fully humidified and housed JR Cigar’s mail-order operation and a retail outlet that sold cigars, perfume, and other items that would appeal and bring in shoppers of all kinds. Due to increasing taxes, JR Cigar relocated its warehouse to Selma, North Carolina, in 1991. Much like its New Jersey facility, the Selma location housed a warehouse and superstore that offered cigars in addition to many other products. Due to the many cigar smokers that traveled from northeastern states through North Carolina to reach Florida, JR Cigar eventually added another super-store to Statesville, North Carolina, which is located 90 miles east of Selma. The famed Cigar Boom kicked off in 1993, and as the demand for premium cigars increased, so did business for JR Cigar, which by then was ranked as one of the largest distributors and retailers of premium and mass-market cigars in the world. Demand outstripped Each JR Cigar brick-and-mortar location is built to be a destination for cigar smokers, offering them both a place to buy in-demand cigars as well as a place to enjoy and smoke them in. [ 42 ] TOBACCO BUSINESS [ SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER | 21 ]