Marshall McGearty Tobacco Artisan
Launches Brand and Tobacco Lounge in Chicago
ANTERIOR LOUNGE
http://www.suntimes.com/output/homan/cst-ftr-susanna26.html#
This Lounge Leaves Tobacco Lovers Alone
BY SUSANNA HOMAN
January 26, 2006
A new cigarette lounge is lighting up in Wicker Park, just as the city snuffs out smoking in many bars and restaurants.
The Marshall McGearty Tobacco Lounge, 1553 N. Milwaukee, held its lung-pumping grand opening party last Thursday. Billed as the nation's first cigarette lounge, it is built to attract smokers who are being slowly forced out of bars and restaurants as Chicago's phased-in ban goes into effect this month. The lounge is exempt from the smoking ban since the majority of sales come from tobacco products, though the lounge also offers cocktails, coffee and cheese plates.
Cigarette giant RJ Reynolds Tobacco is behind the lounge in an effort to give cigarettes more cache, the same way Starbucks has elevated coffee drinking. The lounge offers $8 packs of artisanal smokes made on the spot from custom blends of tobacco leaves. Nine flavors range from the "sweet and delicate" Oriental Rose -- reminiscent of a fine chardonnay, according to the brochure -- to the peppercorn-flavored Earl, which melds Oriental tobaccos with Indian spices.
"I just quit smoking two weeks ago," says guest Amanda Abbott, who attended the opening. "But it's a little tempting that they have all those fancy flavors."
It takes just three minutes to make a pack of 20 handmade cigs, "about the same amount of time it takes to make a cappuccino," says one of the lounge's namesakes, Larry McGearty. Far from being a tobacco artisan, he's a hipster pack-a-day smoker from Philadelphia who is a creative director at Gyro Worldwide, an advertising agency that works with Reynolds. He says the idea for the lounge came during a marketing meeting two years ago (the other namesake, Jerry Marshall, is a Reynolds employee).
McGearty says his contribution to the project is the lounge's design. "This looks like the inside of my house," he says, pointing to a collection of vintage ashtrays, cozy leather club chairs and mismatched tin ceilings. It also stocks "the biggest collection of smoking accoutrements in the city," he says.
Most of the guests lit up, putting to the test the bar's "state-of-the-art ventilation system" that exchanges all of the air in the room every six minutes....
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/national/19smoke.html?pagewanted=1
As Smoke Clears, Tobacco Maker Opens Lounge
By MONICA DAVEY
Published: January 19, 2006
CHICAGO, Jan. 18 - The room is lined with vintage ashtrays, delicate lighters, matches and pens shaped like cigarettes. The scent, naturally, is of smoke.
Chicago's smoking ban took effect this week, but it was hard to know that from inside the gleaming lounge along Milwaukee Avenue in a hip neighborhood on the North Side. Here, under glass, are thick jars of tobacco - Oriental Rose, The Empress, The Earl - poured lovingly into white smoking papers by tobacco's answer to the coffee shop barista.
At the very moment smokers around Chicago were learning not to light up on train platforms, in sports stadiums and in some restaurants, a subsidiary of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company was preparing for the grand opening on Thursday of its answer to the smoke-free set: the Marshall McGearty Tobacco Lounge, what its creators intend to be the nation's first upscale, luxury lounge dedicated to the smoking of cigarettes, especially a new R. J. Reynolds variety.
The timing, Brian Stebbins, a senior marketing director at R. J. Reynolds, said, was purely coincidental. And the shop, he insists, does not fall under the city's new ban since it fits the exempt category of a "tobacco retail store," even though it also sells alcoholic drinks, cheese plates and espresso drinks.
"That's incidental," Mr. Stebbins said, as he wandered the lounge on Wednesday, pointing out the dark wood, the marble bar, the cozy seats by a fireplace. "This is about a select, super premium brand of cigarettes, just like what we've seen with the super premium tier of beer, wine, chocolate and pastries. It's about elegance and having fun."
Not so much fun for those here who fought for the smoking ban - one of the growing number of such restrictions around the country - who said they found the lounge puzzling, disconcerting and possibly illegal.
"This is not what I intended," Alderman Ed Smith, who led efforts to pass the ordinance here, said Wednesday. "I am going to have to make some calls to find out if it's really allowed."
Some antismoking advocates nationally said they worried that the Chicago store might mark a new front in the tobacco industry's efforts to market their products as glamorous, particularly to a young, cutting-edge audience, despite efforts by the industry to comply with a 1998 settlement agreement with scores of states that limits advertising.
"It's trying to get an 18-to-25 demographic here, to make smoking seem desirable, attractive, like a secret club," said Bronson Frick, associate director for Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights, a group based in Berkeley, Calif.
Regardless, on Wednesday afternoon, Sean Fahey, 29, wandered by, stood at the smoking bar and sucked deeply and quizzically on his first Oriental Rose - a step up, he said, from his plain old Camels. (The Marshall McGearty cigarettes are sold by the pack for $8, about $2 more than most commercial brands, and carry the customary warning.)
"More and more places like this are sure to open up," Mr. Fahey said. "No one is going to stop smoking because of a ban, but maybe people can start treating cigarettes like this more like alcohol - the kind of thing you savor."
That was just the image the creators of Marshall McGearty might have had in mind two years ago, when they began dreaming up the mixes of leaves (nine types described in a glossy lounge guide, a menu for cigarettes, in three categories, "light and smooth," "mellow and flavorful," or "rich and full-bodied") and, of course, dreaming up ways to market such an idea.
The name, the lounge's press release says, was the "brainchild" of a partnership between Jerry Marshall, a "senior staff blends specialist" in R. J. Reynolds' research and development department, and Larry McGearty, a creative director at Gyro Worldwide, a Philadelphia advertising agency that has handled tobacco accounts.
The partnership, like everything else about this brand, was portrayed as having an aura of mystique. "And with that idea," the press release said of the two men, "they set out to make some of the world's best smokes and to build unique sanctuaries where their works of art could be properly enjoyed."
But how, precisely, was such a sanctuary allowed in a city that had just finished its argument over where to ban smoking?
As part of a compromise agreement among the city's aldermen, the ordinance ultimately included provisions that allowed bars and restaurants with bars to delay putting the rule into effect until July 1, 2008. And it included language to exempt a business that can prove its ventilation system is so efficient that its inside air is as clean as the air outside.
But the lounge, Mr. Stebbins said, is relying on a different exemption. Chicago's ordinance excludes "retail tobacco stores," places where 65 percent of the sales are of "tobacco" or "tobacco accessories," according to the city's Law Department. Many cities include similar exemptions in their smoking ordinances, including New York, where sales of tobacco at exempted stores must account for more than half of sales.
In the past, though, here and in other places, "retail tobacco stores" had usually referred to places like mom-and-pop tobacco shops or old-fashioned cigar shops, experts in other cities said. "Come to think of it, I guess they could do this in New York," said Russell Sciandra, director of the Center for a Tobacco Free New York. "But if customers are buying liquor and food, that starts to add up fast and that can't become the bulk of what they are selling."
The managers of the lounge said they were not worried: people would mostly come here to buy cigarettes, they said. What is more, only those 21 years or older will be allowed in - one of many ways, they said, that the lounge does not violate the 1998 settlement agreement.
"We are very serious to make sure we are complying, all with a goal to make sure we are not directly or indirectly advertising to minors," said Carole Crosslin, director of communications at R. J. Reynolds.
Several antismoking advocates said the lounge, indeed, seemed to comply with the legal terms of the settlement, though some said they wondered whether it was truly meeting the intent of the agreement.
"Glamorizing tobacco use will encourage young people who are smokers to continue doing so, and it will encourage some young people who don't smoke to do so - just because it's a glamorous, upscale place," said William V. Corr, executive director of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "The question of whether this appeals to youth is a factual question we will have to watch."
But Richard A. Daynard, a law professor at Northeastern University and president of the Tobacco Control Resource Center, said he was not bothered by the lounge, mostly because he believes the idea will not work.
"It's a gimmick," he said. "I certainly would be surprised if it's still in business five years from now. The problem is that their clientele is not this, but mainly working class and poor people."
For his part, Mr. Stebbins said he had not considered whether such smoking lounges might move elsewhere too. "I'm focusing on Chicago right now," he said.
Across the room, Bob Kittrell, 45, sat smoking.
"This is my place now," said Mr. Kittrell, who lives nearby. "It's the only place around that I can drink coffee and read the papers and smoke my cigarettes anymore."
He was, in fact, smoking his own cigarettes, a box of ordinary Camels, but said he might try the Marshall McGearty mix sometime.
Sarah Garcia, who works at the Marshall McGearty Tobacco Lounge in Chicago, wiped off a display case filled with different types of tobacco.
http://www.smokersclubinc.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2470
Friday, December 9, 2005
RJR opens trendy smoking lounge in Chicago
The Associated Press
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C.— On the same day Chicago officials banned smoking in many public places, one of the nation's largest cigarette makers opened a private smoke shop featuring a tobacconist, plush leather couches and custom cigarettes for $8 a pack.
R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., which is based in Winston-Salem and makes Camel and Winston cigarettes among other brands, opened the Marshall McGearty Tobacco Lounge in Chicago on Wednesday, when it showcased its new "super-premium" Marshall McGearty Tobacco Artisans brand.
The lounge is exempt from the new law approved by the Chicago City Council because it is defined as a retail tobacco store.
"We're pleased that we're not going to have to change our business model," Brian Stebbins, a marketing manager at Reynolds, said Thursday. Plans for the lounge were made before the smoking-ban issue started gaining steam, he said.
The smoking ban does not go into effect until July 1, 2008. After that date, smoking would be permitted if a restaurant or bar installs air-filtration systems.
The Marshall McGearty lounge already has a powerful air-ventilation system, said Fred McConnell, a Reynolds spokesman.
That's one indication of RJR's claim that the Marshall McGearty lounge is no ordinary smoke shop. Besides a tobacconist whose role is to explain the different blends of tobacco, it also has small cigarette-making devices so customers can custom-order packs of cigarettes.
The Marshall McGearty cigarettes will be available only in the Chicago store.
"It wouldn't work if it were something on a rack in a gas station," Stebbins said.
Places where smokers can feel comfortable are becoming rare and the lounge is a place that welcomes smokers and where they can enjoy themselves, Stebbins said.
"We're calling it a smokers' paradise," he said.
The lounge also offers light food, baked goods and a selection of coffee beverages, including lattes and espressos. There are plans to sell alcoholic beverages. The lounge also has cafe tables, leather couches and a fireplace.
Both the brand and lounge get their names from Jerry Marshall and Larry McGearty, the two men who came up with the idea. Marshall is a senior staff blends specialist in Reynolds' research and development department. McGearty is the creative director for Gyro Worldwide, an advertising agency.
Reynolds, a subsidiary of Reynolds American Inc., plans to test the idea and see how the brand does before potentially expanding the concept.
"If the brand does well, it could be an important contributor to Reynolds American's bottom line," he said.
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Information from: Winston-Salem Journal,