Zig Zag

The Zig Zag company was founded in 1879 by Maurice and Jacques Braunstein. Based in Paris, in 1882 the company built the Papeterie de Gassicourt, a cigarette paper production plant near the town of Mantes-la-Jolie. In 1894 they invented the process of “interleaving” rolling papers.

They called their papers Zig-Zag, after the term used to describe the alternate interleaving process. In 1900, Zig-Zag was awarded a gold medal at the Universal Exposition in Paris.

The character portrayed on the front of Zig-Zag products, colloquially known as the “Zig-Zag man”, originates from a folk story about a Zouave, a French colonial soldier at the battle of Sevastopol during the Crimean war. When the soldier’s clay pipe was destroyed by a bullet, he attempted to roll his tobacco into a cigarette using a piece of paper torn from his bag of gunpowder.