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TOBACCO OUTLET BUSINESS
MAY/JUNE 2012
OTC Pipe Tobacco Still on Top
Despite that these are highly diverse times in pipe tobacco, retailers
can maintain good sales success by focusing on the mainstays
By Bill Doherty,
head of market development,
Daughters & Ryan
V
ariety is the spice of life and the spice of pipe
smoking. In fact, many consider this to be the
Golden Age of pipe tobacco thanks to the plethora
of blends and boutique blends blanketing the market today.
What’s more—many old blends, once discontinued, are
being reintroduced. The Internet is partly responsible for
these highly diverse times in pipe tobacco—boutique blends
and resurged blends that once had limited distribution are
now readily available to anyone with a computer.
But this shouldn’t discourage tobacco outlet retailers from
successfully participating in the pipe tobacco market with a
simple and reasonable investment. Despite all the high-end
tobacco that’s available lately from around the world with
merely a few keystrokes, pre-packaged over-the-counter
(OTC) blends are still the top sellers in the U.S. And if you
have a good selection of them readily available in your store,
pipe smokers will come and buy them.
Keep in mind, most new pipe smokers end up wasting a
lot of tobacco when they first start out. Many don’t load a
bowl right and/or they don’t finish it. For the newbie pipe
smoker and pipe retailer, it’s an easy way to get started in
pipe tobacco without investing in names you don’t know or
understand.
The Mainstays
My first pipe tobacco in the 1970s was the OTC blend
Borkum Riff. It had an exotic-sounding name and an etching
of a big sailing ship on the package; to me as a college student,
this was a high-end tobacco from some faraway place.
That was my perception. In reality, it was readily available,
affordable and very popular. It is still a traditional mainstay
tobacco, along with Captain Black, Carter Hall, Prince
Albert,Mixture No. 79, Half & Half and a host of traditional
OTCs that have been around for decades and comprise a list
too long to put in this column.
But these are proven top sellers in the industry and a whole
majority of pipe smokers in any generation start off with these
pipe tobaccos. And a good percentage of them, even if they
buy boutique blends to accent their pipe experience, still buy
these OTC blends on a daily basis because they are readily
affordable and available. So as a retailer, you do not have to
carry the high-dollar tins of premium blends, although you
can certainly offer some to enhance your selection. But you
must offer the OTC mainstays.
The Next Level
One level up from that takes us to what most every
tobacconist shop in the U.S. offers its pipe smokers—
Lane’s bulk blends. This is where a retailer sets up a series
of glass canisters from Lane’s and fills them with about ¾
lb. of their various bulk blends so that customers can buy
them fresh out of the jar, sometimes mixing them to make
their own custom blends. Lane’s blends, such as 1Q, BCA,
RLP6 to name a few, are aromatic, which means their room
note, or aroma of smoke, is pleasurable. Retailers can also
develop their own blend of these tobaccos and Lane’s will
print up a label with the store name on it. Bulk blends are
an affordable way for tobacco retailers to offer a traditional
blending service—a cost-effective way to take it up a notch
from OTC tobacco.
Beyond that, a pipe smoker might start trying different
blends of tobacco that Lane’s offers, then move up to
premium and boutique blends, and then he might try to buy
some high-dollar classic blends that are being remade. This
process would take years, it’s a natural progression of how you
would grow as a pipe smoker and retailers who are growing
as pipe purveyors may want to follow suit and grow along
with their customers’ palates.
But it all starts with OTC tobacco. So as a retailer it’s okay
to stay focused on it—as many pipe smokers do.
TOB