dstieger wrote:Do you want to be:
A. Everyman's shop? Heavy General/Altadis?
B. Boutique-y?
Hard when starting out to be both. Very hard to be B and be successful, but not impossible.
May need to be A until you get steady, repeatable business. Then, planned, organized transition into A/B hybrid, or even a B.
very wise... the inventory I "inherited" was heavily General/Altadis... we've cleared/discontinued a lot, but not all of that... we still carry a couple of RyJ's, a few punch's, a couple H.Upmannns, and a few Montecristo's...
The plan right now is and has been to help educate new/newer smokers (about 80%-90% of our cigar sales)... a lot of that is me sitting in there for 3 and 4 hours a night and talking to every person who comes in about the cigars they smoke or have smoked and trying to pass on to them the info I have received from other guys - many of whom frequent this forum...
when customers who frequent us ask us to carry something and we know it isn't garbage, we'll carry it... that's how we got the Onyx and the Patel Super Ligero's... that's worked well as it's helped me to help others smoke stuff they normally wouldn't... turns out a bunch of people really like the Super ligero...
The thing we have going for us in trying to accomplish "B" is that the shop is not a cigar shop/not dependent on cigar sales... we're a california smoke shop... lots of hookah's, upright waterpipes (like a bong but for tobacco), cigarettes, black and mild's, a bigger selection of white owl's than you've probably ever seen, rolling papers, oil burners (crack pipes not meant for crack), and a ton of other stuff that keeps the lights on...