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TOBACCO BUSINESS
MARCH/APRIL 2014
cigar companies and, ideally, price-
protected vendors,” he advises. Johnson
teases his salespeople that every time
they sell a Macanudo, they owe him five
dollars. “I’ve burned a lot of bridges, but
these brands aren’t doing us any favors; in
fact, they’re ultimately trying to put us out
of business.”
Develop private label trademarks/
bundles.
In addition to small-batch,
limited-release cigars,the other way brick-
and-mortar cigar retailers can protect
themselves is to develop bundles with
vendors who can “put your own trademark
on them,” according to Johnson.
Bait and switch customers.
Yes,
Johnson believes it’s fair game and smart
cigar sense to bait and switch customers
from popular brands to trademarks or
your allies’ brands. He says, “You have
to face out your humidor with trending
cigars.
Cigar Aficionado
holds a lot of
weight with customers—it’s annoying. So
we’ll get the top 10 and put them on the
shelf.Then we’ll put a brand like Victor’s
[Vitale] next to it, or another small-batch
brand, and we’ll tell our customers, ‘If you
like that, try this.’ So you get them there
and then it’s like bait and switch,” but
really, he is just opening their cigar palates
to smaller brands that have merit and are
better for his store’s business.
Forget a one-day-only cigar event.
“One day is stupid,” says Johnson. He
believes in holding cigar events for two
weeks or all month long. It’s great to
hold a special evening cigar night, but
in Johnson’s mind it makes much more
sense to market that night as the kick-
off to the event—to offer that brand’s
cigar special for a much longer period
so that customers who couldn’t make
it that evening can still get excited and
purchase the promotional offer(s). “My
sales manager and I came up with this
last year after he made a comment to
me that in his previous business—
furniture—events were held all month
long,” explains Johnson. Holy Smokes’
business increased by 20 to 25 percent
just by making that one change.
Give employees commissions on
featured brands.
Johnson says it’s not
enough to get customers excited about the
events—employees should feel it too,with
programs that offer them commissions on
the monthly or bi-weekly featured brands.
“On these and the brands [that] we get
good margins on or whatever we want
to push, we will give our employees five
percent kickbacks,” he relays. “It prevents
them from becoming lazy.”
Rearrange the lounge area.
One
grouping in the lounge area is not ideal
anymore, according to Johnson. “People
argue and they form groups—you can
ultimately lose customers in the long
run, especially after your lounge has been
around awhile, if you don’t account for
separate sitting areas,” he says. Of course
this is dependent on space, but Johnson
believes it’s not the size of the groupings
that count, but the arrangement. Holy
Smokes improved its customer satisfaction
and cigar sales when it regrouped the
lounge to have three different sitting areas
instead of one.
Don’t forget the females.
Part of the
Holy Smokes lounge “clean-up” was to
make it more female-friendly, as Johnson
tells it. “It’s got to be very clean and it’s
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