The brand was first introduced to the market in 1913 by the American company R.J. Reynolds Tobacco. Prior to this, the company manufactured pipe tobacco. The founder, Richard Reynolds, realized that another product, tobacco, was gaining in popularity worldwide. It was important to seize this opportunity to enter the market with his own brand.
What’s more, Reynolds had just returned from Turkey, where he had tasted fragrant oriental tobacco. The idea of using spicy oriental varieties in tobacco blends never left his mind.
Oriental themes were all the rage at the time. The manufacturer decided to call his tobacco Camel. Until then, no one had used the image of an exotic animal on the packaging of a tobacco product.
But it turned out that a little-known cigarette maker was already producing a cigarette with the same name, Red Camel, and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco bought the rights to that brand, dropped the Red prefix and developed the design we know today. This design remained virtually unchanged for the first 110 years of the brand’s existence.
Even before Camel cigarettes were marketed, a vast advertising campaign was launched for the new product. Images of camels appeared in American daily newspapers. They are accompanied by incomprehensible slogans such as “Soon there will be more camels” and “Camels are coming”.
There is no direct evidence that this animal is linked to tobacco. Americans are intrigued. For weeks, they had been hearing about the arrival of the camel in the pages of the newspapers.
In the summer of 1913, on the day of the brand’s launch, the story finally broke. The daily newspaper published a life-size image of a cigarette box and the slogan “Camel cigarettes are already here! – was the tagline.
Historians note that sales of these cigarettes were phenomenal. People wanted to try the “Camel”, which the media relentlessly pushed. In his first year, Richard Reynolds sold 425 million boxes of Camel, beating out his competitors.
What are Camel cigarettes?
Camel is a brand known to millions of people around the world. As the best-selling cigarette brand, Camel has become a true symbol of quality and style. Camel cigarettes are made from a specially developed tobacco blend. Although the exact composition is a trade secret, the main components of Marlboro tobacco are known to be high-quality aromatic tobaccos from different regions of the world. The Virginia Gold, Burley and Oriental varieties are used in tobacco production. Twice in the brand’s history, designers have attempted to redesign Camel’s image “to give it a more contemporary look”. And twice, the sales department was inundated with letters from angry smokers demanding the return of the original Camel image on the pack. The result: 110 years later, the same “Old Joe”, as the camel was known at the beginning of the 20th century, is still staring back at us from the pack.