Davidoff

Davidoff of Geneva traces its origin to 1911, when Henri Davidoff, who had recently fled Kiev with his family, opened a tobacco shop on the Boulevard des Philosophes in Geneva. His son, Zino Davidoff — born in 1906 — took over management of the shop in the 1930s and built the personal reputation that would eventually attach to the Davidoff name; as a young man he had traveled through Cuba, Honduras, and Brazil studying tobacco cultivation.

The Davidoff cigar brand itself, distinct from the original tobacco shop, was born later: in 1968, the brand's now-iconic oval white cigar band was introduced on cigars created in Cuba under Zino Davidoff's direction. In 1970, the Oettinger Group acquired Zino Davidoff's Geneva shop, and under Dr. Ernst Schneider the company began building Davidoff into an international retail and cigar brand. The Geneva flagship reopened after renovation in 2015 under a standardized design concept explicitly built around the tagline "Davidoff of Geneva – since 1911."

Today the non-cigarette side of the business operates as the Oettinger Davidoff Group, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, with retail operations including US shops trading as Davidoff of Geneva. Those stores carry cigars across multiple collections, cigarillos, humidors, cutters, lighters, and pipe tobacco — the current range documented on the brand's US retail site does not itself reference leather goods or fragrances.