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| CIGAR TRADE CONVENES IN VEGAS |
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Page 1 of 2  Plus: “Hellboy” on cigars and shooting a movie!Los Angeles, July 14 – Amid smoking bans, a challenging economy and the renewed threat of heavy taxation from a revived SCHIP bill in Congress, more than 5,000 attendees have descended on Las Vegas for the 76th International Premium Cigar & Pipe Retailers Association convention and trade show. Held for the fifth time in Sin City in the past 10 years, the show has more than 250 exhibitors taking up some 1,294 booths on the exhibit floor of the Sands Expo Center. If you’ve never been to the IPCPR – formerly known as the RTDA for the association’s original name of “Retail Tobacco Dealers of America” – it’s pretty easy to tell who the big players in the trade are by the amount of space they have on the show floor: What’s new at this show? Many cigar manufacturers have already announced their brand introductions ahead of time and one of the themes of this year’s show may be a split in price: cigars and accessories aimed at most buyers and some brand and items targeting only the very affluent buyer. One example of the latter is S.T. Dupont, whose U.S. distribution contract with Colibri ended and is now being distributed by the high-end Lotus MJYX group, whose brands include Porsche Design, Bugatti and Lotus. Among the new cigar introductions, General Cigar is debuting the Cohiba Puro Dominicana – using, of course, all Dominican-grown tobaccos – in four sizes, from $13.50 to $20.50 each, before local sales and tobacco taxes. In California, for example, such cigars will sell at retail for around $16.50 to $25.10 each, or $414 to $628 per box of 25! There will also be plenty of “limited-production” and “limited-edition” introductions, which have dual benefits for manufacturers. First, there’s the opportunity to market a “limited” or “hard-to-get” cigar, which helps demand and can allow for higher pricing. But equally important for some makers, the “limited” label also allows them to experiment with new blends without going to the cost of a full production run and the attendant costs for promotion and marketing. If the cigar is well received, it can be expanded into a full-fledged line. One example: the Avo Signature Series. It started as the Avo 75 Limited Edition in just one size (a 7-inch by 50-ring double corona), but was so popular that it’s now a standard-production cigar made in five sizes. |
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Did you know?
“"A woman is only a woman, but a cigar is a smoke" ~ Rudyard Kipling
