The Cigar Queen

Centuries-old British importer Hunters & Frankan puts their freshest face forward.

Someone along the line probably made the mistake of underestimating Jemma Freeman. It’s sort of easy to see why: standing at what appears to be a petite 5-foot-7-inches, she doesn’t seem like one of those corporate He-Men who march through the world dispensing bone-crashing handshakes and vertebrae-shattering backslaps. But nonetheless the 33-year-old has managed to take the reins of Hunters & Frankau, a 200-year-old business empire that’s the largest premium-cigar importer in the UK, and guide the beast to even bigger glory. Ivanka Trump could take lessons.

Beginning with James Reykers Freeman, who set up one of the first Britain-based cigar factories in Hoxton East London in the late-1830s, six generations of family members have run the company. By the time Robert Freeman, Jemma’s grandfather, took over J.R. Freeman, it was the second largest manufacturer in the country, having acquired their rival J. Frankau & Co. After a few more take-overs and the enrollment of another major player in the business, John Hunter & Co., established in 1790, Hunters & Frankau was born.

Seizing the Market
It was Jemma’s father Nicholas Freeman, a well-liked bon vivant with an insatiable appetite for fine food, wine and cigars, who masterminded the 1963 merge of John Hunter, Morris & Elkin and J. Frankau & Co. He reverted the company back to a private proprietorship in 1979, and increased its market share twenty percent over the course of a decade. By the late-1980s, almost half of the premium hand-rolled cigars sold in hotels, restaurants and tobacconists across the UK were imported and distributed by Hunters & Frankau. Now that number is four out of every five, and chances are those four are of the utmost quality.

Jemma Freeman, though, has to deal with something of a curveball, courtesy of the British government — the indoor smoking ban that went into effect July 1 of last year. For Freeman, who started out her tenure with the company in 2002 by putting warning labels on each box in accordance with the Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act, it must be particularly irritating. Nonetheless, within days of the ban being implemented she devised a way to sidestep the heavy-handed legislation by hosting an outdoor cigar dinner, the most successful event they’ve ever held.

“There is a great interest in events here, and there are a huge amount of people still keen on smoking cigars in that sort of social environment,” says Jemma. “I think we will be seeing a much more seasonal market.”

Consumer information is being passed along through brand literature, which is distributed in accordance with smoking-related prohibitions. “The Internet offers increasing opportunities to extend this activity more directly to smoker, although most communication can only be supplied through a password-protected site,” marketing director Simon Chase explains. But promotions, no matter how successful, are moot without a product strong enough to stand on its own.

Her late father’s priority was maintaining a strong relationship with the Cuban cigar manufacturing industry — for almost two decades, Hunters & Frankau has been the sole importer of Habanos S.A. cigars in the U.K., with the majority of their 31 brands out of Cuba. Others hail from Switzerland, Holland and the Dominican Republic, all of which comprise the company’s annual sale of slightly less than 20 million cigars.

Throughout the 1990s, Hunters & Frankau, along with other independent distributors around the world, including Spanish distribution giant Tabacalera S.A. (now Altadis S.A.), made a multi-million dollar investment into the fledging Cuban cigar market, as a sort of fiduciary duty. Which may be why the tobacco products coming out of Cuba these days are being hailed as the best in years, and why Freeman, despite Britain’s ban, seems confident of her company’s success.

“It is that classic phrase: people smoke less, but they smoke better,” she laughs. “There will always be a demand for the best tobacco, and that is what we represent here. It is the key to our success.”