Davidoff

Davidoff is a Swiss brand better known in the world of cigars than pipes, though it has also offered signature briar pipes since the mid-1970s. The brand's origins trace to the small tobacconist's shop the Davidoff family, having fled the Russian Empire, opened after settling in Geneva in 1911. The shop was founded by Henri (born Hillel) Davidoff; it was his son Zino Davidoff (1906-1994) who made the brand known worldwide.

From Shop to Brand

From its earliest years, the Geneva shop was a favored gathering place for the city's Russian émigrés. After Zino Davidoff entered the tobacco trade in 1924, he turned his attention to the question of storing and aging tobacco. Converting the shop's basement into a temperature- and humidity-controlled cellar is considered the first commercial cigar depot built at this scale in Europe, and is regarded as the intellectual ancestor of today's desktop humidor boxes. It was this approach to storage and presentation, more than any single product, that built Zino's reputation.

At the height of his career, in 1970, Zino Davidoff handed the business over to the long-established Basel-based family company Oettinger. Ernst Schneider, at the company's head, positioned Davidoff as the brand's figurehead, and through the 1970s the name expanded beyond cigars into pipe tobaccos, cigarillos and various accessories.