There’s a new Chicago hot spot that acts like a club but does business as a tobacco store. It’s the Marshall McGearty Lounge, which opened in Chicago’s trendy Wicker Park neighborhood in December. The lounge is the launching pad for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.’s new upscale brand of high-end, handmade cigarettes better suited to plush leather couches than c-store counters.
The brand, Marshall Mc-Gearty Tobacco Artisans, is sold only at the lounge for $8 a pack. Customers choose from nine blends, and store staffers roll cigarettes to order in the lounge’s cigarette machine. The lounge gives the Marshall McGearty brand cachet — and the price tag gives RJR a profit margin it couldn’t get with a simple line extension via traditional retail outlets.
“This is our first step in connoisseurship for cigarettes,” says RJR senior marketing director Brian Stebbins. “The lounge is all about introducing the brand. We looked at how connoisseurship started in other categories, like wine, coffee and chocolate. There’s always a place for the full brand immersion experience.”
This month, the Marshall McGearty Lounge begins hosting weekly tobacco tastings, “inviting adult smokers to go deeper and learn how to properly taste the properties of tobacco,” Stebbins says. “We wanted to build some clientele before starting the tastings, because we wanted to introduce the concept of connoisseurship on a larger scale first.”
The lounge will market its tastings via in-store displays and a sign-up sheet: “It seems like something that would only appeal to people who have already experienced the brand,” Stebbins says. The lounge also has begun hosting DJ sets on Friday nights, and plans to throw monthly parties.
The lounge also sells gourmet snacks from a local caterer and bakeries, coffee, tea, liquor and wine. Plush seating, a state-of-the-art air-circulation system and an eclectic library of books and board games set the atmosphere.
“We went for this eclectic Oscar Wilde meets rock star meets mod vibe. We wanted it to be refined, yet not stodgy,” says Steven Grasse, CEO of Gyro Worldwide, which designed the lounge and brand with RJR.
RJR approached Philadelphia-based Gyro to “literally reinvent the cigarette experience,” says Grasse.
Winston-Salem, NC-based RJR has no plans yet for additional lounges, or wider distribution of Marshall-McGearty products.
“We’re still looking at the lounge’s potential, since that’s the introduction method,” Stebbins says. “This is a very new concept for the company and for the industry; we’ve got a lot more questions to answer.”
The idea has been in development for two years; RJR developed the products, then the brand, then the launch strategy.
The lounge opened just as Chicago enacted a citywide smoking ban in bars and restaurants, but the lounge is exempt from the ban because more than 65% of its revenues come from tobacco sales. RJR has said that the timing is coincidental.
RJR has done some direct marketing to Chicagoans in its database; print ads, including ads in alternative weekly newspapers, continue to tout the lounge locally.
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