TodaysDFW: Ole Grapevine Cigar & Tobacco Co.

Sunday, May 6, 2018

Ole Grapevine Cigar & Tobacco Co.

Our memories are the bones that hold our lives together. They can be happy or sad, funny or profound. Particularly powerful are the memories of our youth. Ken Wiles remembers working with his father, USMC Captain Earl Wiles, in their first family tobacco shop, Tobacco Lane, one of the Tobacco Land franchises from the ‘60s and ‘70s. “I began my now 38-year career in the tobacco business by mixing pipe tobacco blends together as a young boy,” Wiles says, “and working with my father, who had recently returned from service in Vietnam, was a memory I will never forget.”

Today, Wiles owns three full service tobacco stores in the Dallas-Forth Worth area and while each of them is fantastically successful, they all are rooted in the fundamentals and values Wiles learned as a young boy with a great deal of responsibility. “Dad was retiring from the Marine Corps and the military was ready to settle down. He and my mother began looking for a small business to own and operate. They settled on the retail tobacco industry and it was actually my Mom, Cynda, who opened the first store, the Tobacco Lane franchise store at Six Flags Mall [one of the first tobacco stores in Dallas-Forth Worth], because Dad had not quite reached his military retirement date,” Wiles remembers, “and I started working in the shop as a 14-year-old by mixing pipe tobaccos and doing odd jobs around the store.” The store primarily sold pipes and tobaccos, cigarettes, and as was typical of 1970, very few cigars. Garcia y Vega, El Producto, and Travis Club were the main choices…with not much in between. “After several years Dad wanted to expand and open additional stores…and if you can imagine this, I started opening stores for him when I was 16 years old. It was a huge responsibility and I really enjoyed the business – it was very interesting to me even though I was only 16.” The small family organization continued to grow in those years and eventually they opened four retail tobacco stores, all located in shopping malls.

Like everyone who was in the tobacco business at the time, Wiles recalls the cigar boom days of the ‘90s with a sense of wonder and vivid memories. “We had already seen the tobacco business evolve to include a significant gift component, and then the rise of the cigar boom completely redefined the industry,” Wiles says. “We were already moving to the free-standing tobacco store concept, the first of which we opened named the Ole Grapevine Cigar and Tobacco Shop in 1996. I also had a Eureka moment during this time—in the back of my mind I knew there would be a demand for a comfortable place to relax and smoke cigars in peace, but I wasn’t quite ready to add what became the club concept yet. In fact, in 1996, with all of the buying power our family stores represented, we had a hard time filling the shelves with cigars because the demand was so great.”

To read the entire story, visit:
www.grapevinecigarshop.com

Stop in today and pick something up for your dad or father-in-law and get your father's day shopping done early. Better yet, buy that special guy a VIP membership which includes: