2019 PCA Magazine

PREMIUMCIGARS.ORG MIUMCIGAR.ORG JULY-AUGUST 2019 | PCA The Magazine 43 H I S PATH TO SUCC ESS B Y G R E G G I R A R D P H O T O G R A P H Y B Y T R A D E S T R E E T M E D I A CRAIG CASS sits behind his desk surrounded by anything and everything needed to run five successful premium cigar stores. There is order in the chaos—from the promotional posters and stands to the boxes of drying cigars—even if an outsider can’t recognize it. Apologizing again in his easy southern drawl for keeping me waiting (there was an emergency call with the PCA board on a judge’s ruling inMaryland), Cass defers an interruption by one of his staff and ignores the ringing telephone. It has the feel of a typical day for Cass as he smiles and jokes—epitomizing a calming force within the storm. Indeed, to run through Cass’s past 48 hours would have most others checking their calendars for their next vacation days. Fromhelping host a 25th anniversary cigar club dinner and his PCA duties as ex officio and chair of PCA’s legal committee to invitingMike Conder and Jon Huber of Crowned Heads for an event later in the day tomanaging those five brick-and-mortar stores (three Tinder Box stores and one Tobacco Trader store in Charlotte, North Carolina, and one Tinder Box inMyrtle Beach, South Carolina), Cass takes it all in stride. After all, he’s been at this for a while now. “I grew up in a tobacco family. My grandfather, my father, evenmy mother at one time all worked for R.J. Reynolds inWinston-Salem. I grew up in Winston-Salemwhere tobacco was always in the DNA, and I loved it,” he says. “In the summers during high school, if your parents worked at RJR, you had summer work. So as a 16-, 17-year-old, I worked in the factories at RJR, and it was brutal, hard work. My dad would say, ‘Man this is going to make you appreciate your education.’ And it did.” Cass didn’t think toomuch about going into the family business, even after his father came home from a trade show in the early seventies with the idea of opening a cigar shop. While in Atlanta for the show, senior Cass visited the Tinder Box and took to the concept, becoming the first Tinder Box franchisee in the Carolinas. Fast forward to younger Cass’s senior year of college and his father reached out with a proposal: There’s a shop for sale in Charlotte, let’s buy it and youmove down there to run it.