General Cigar Holdings, Inc. - 1997 dated Specimen Stock Certificate
Inv# SE3645 Specimen Stock
Specimen Stock printed by American Bank Note Company. General Cigar Company is the largest manufacturer of premium cigars in the world. It is a subsidiary of Scandinavian Tobacco Group with North American headquarters located in Richmond, Virginia. In 1961 General Cigar, which was profitably selling about $30 million worth of cigars annually, was purchased for approximately $25 million by a group of investors headed by Edgar M. Cullman (brother of then Philip Morris Company CEO Joseph Cullman), a fourth generation American in the tobacco industry.
Later in the 1960s, Culbro and General Cigar acquired Gradiaz Annis, maker of Gold Label cigars and the Temple Hall factory that owned the Macanudo brand name, ushering in a turn towards hand-rolled premium cigars. Macanudo, a small label made in limited quantities for the market in the United Kingdom, was seen as the principal vehicle for growth in the premium cigar category. A careful effort was made to reblend the product for the large American marketplace (then and now subject to a ban on Cuban tobacco, the industry's gold standard) using select binder and filler from the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Mexico and Connecticut shade-grown wrapper. Mass advertising was conducted in support of the brand, which by the early 1990s had grown into the best selling premium cigar label in the United States. Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Cigar_Company
Stock and Bond Specimens are made and usually retained by a printer as a record of the contract with a client, generally with manuscript contract notes such as the quantity printed. Specimens are sometimes produced for use by the printing company's sales team as examples of the firm’s products. These are usually marked "Specimen" and have no serial numbers.
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