More and more online cigar stores have come up that are
offering cigars for sale and are proving a strong competition for Brick-and-Mortar
Shops.
It’s been almost two months since the IPCPR Trade Show so,
with the dust settling, it’s a good time to look back at some industry trends
that were on display at the show. These Tobacco Store online stocks a whole range of cigars and offer cigar deals to a lot of customers who shop online for cigars and their accessories.
Quality Increasing
It’s my belief that quality is going up across the board in
the cigar industry, and smoking plenty of samples only solidifies this opinoin.
Obviously these are generalizations and no doubt there are exceptions, but it
seems not only are the cigars being produced now better constructed than they
were 5-10 years ago, they are better cigars that lack obvious flavor flaws. The
result is good for consumers. Whether you buy discounted samplers online, or
just pick up what looks interesting at your local cigar shop, odds are you’re
going to end up with decent or good cigars.
Expectations on the Rise
When finding a good cigar is easy, consumers expectations
are raised. The result can be challenging for cigar companies. Here’s a thought
experiment: Take a recent cigar release and imagine how it would have done if
it was released five years earlier. Last year, CAO introduced the Concert
series, a cigar with sales (I get the sense) that seem to be a little
disappointing to CAO’s parent company, General Cigar. I’d suspect that if that
same blend at the same price point had been introduced five years earlier (two
years before CAO La Traviata) it would have been a smash hit. It is, in my
opinion, a classic example of a cigar that would have stood out in 2007 or
earlier, but now is just another good cigar in the crowd.
Small Brands Fill Niches
It’s easy to discount cigar brands that don’t own a factory
but instead contract someone else to make their cigars. For one thing, there’s
an extra level, and that means an additional mark-up before the cigar reaches
consumers. The brand owner has to buy cigars then mark them up before they are
sold wholesale. Also, people assume that if the blend was so great why didn’t
the factory just release and market it themselves? Those are valid points, but
there’s also a niche that these small brands can fill. For large companies like General
Cigar, Altadis, Davidoff, and Drew Estate, it doesn’t make a ton of economic
sense to create a cigar that will sell only 40,000 cigars. But for a small
cigar line owned by a single brand owner, that level of volume can be a nice
little business, and they can afford to make a cigar that, while it may never
be a huge seller, may find a small but dedicated fan base.
What’s a Flavored Cigar?
With the advent of fire-cured tobacco, the line between
traditional and flavored cigars is beginning to blur. Drew Estate’s
Kentucky Fire Cured and Sam Leccia’s Black line are the most prominent,
but others (Gran Habano) are introducing cigars that use fire-cured tobacco.
It’s an interesting development where the line between traditional and flavored
(Drew Estate calls them “infused”) is breaking down, because the difference
isn’t unnatural chemicals being introduced to the cigar making process, but the
traditional process being tweaked using old technology not normally used for
handmade cigars. Look for this trend to continue.
