'Roll your own has been one of the success stories of the past years,' said Paul Batchelor, trading manager at Nisaway, the company that supplies produce to all independent stores across Britain. 'Young, urban, fashionable people have started subverting the convention of the old, working-class man to roll his own fags. Partly, I suspect, it's the shock element. Young people enjoy turning the convention on its head, and young women in particular like doing something that was so firmly off-limits to them until very recently.
'There's an unmistakeable element of coolness in rolling your own cigarette,' he added. 'You see young people competing in pub gardens to roll the smoothest or thinnest ciggy. What we are also seeing is that the young people who started rolling their own cigarettes at university because they were cheap, no longer move on to manufactured cigarettes once they became older and more affluent, which is what they used to do. What we're seeing now is that as young people leave university and enter the world of conventional work, as accountants and lawyers, they continue to roll their own cigarettes,' he said.
Smoking is, according to market analysts Nielsen, a market in decline. Sales of cigarettes are down almost 4 per cent year on year, with the slope becoming steeper in recent months: in the last quarter of 2007, sales were down 6.7 per cent. The roll-your-own category, however, is now one of the most dynamic sectors of the market with volume up 7 per cent and value up 12 per cent in the 12 months to December 2007. 'Roll your own has always appealed to older, male smokers, but now there are 1.9 million female smokers, up from 1.7 million in 2005,' Iain Watkins, trade communications manager from Imperial Tobacco told the Grocer magazine. 'This rise is largely due to the rise in younger smokers, which is giving it a funkier edge.'
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