PCA Magazine Show Issue 2021

PREMIUMCIGARS.ORG SHOW 2021 | PCA The Magazine 33 the show to help improve her business, she needed a way to remember it all. So she started taking notes. “I highly recommend talking to literally everybody you can. There is no shame inwalking into a booth thinking that you have no interest in it and talking to those owners and hearing what they think is important,” she says. “I’ve walked into booths more than once because I saw a retailer I knewwith a similar customer base already in that booth. We’ve brought in accessories and cigars that way, where we’ve seen somebody that we know purchasing something that we hadn’t thought about in the past.” Hutson adds: “Same thing at lunches and seminars, you sit down with somebody that you don’t know, ask them about their store, get some ideas. And to help me remember it all, I come home with notebooks full of ideas—it might be one sentence that somebody says when you’re having lunch that you realize, wait a minute, that’s a great idea. Bring it home to your store. So the serendipity of the moment is important and surrounding yourself with people who know this business. Always keep your ears open and write it down so you remember it later.” GET INVOLVED The PCA trade show, in some respects, resembles a three-legged stool. You have the business leg—selling and purchasing product. The entertainment leg—catching up with friends, enjoying the cigar parties and Vegas. And then there’s the educational leg— learning about the industry, the challenges of national, state and local regulations; laws and taxes; and the continual advocacy needed for the industry to survive. Owens discovered this during her first year at the show. She says: “I’ll never forget it. I had registered for the state association breakout session that day and when I got there I found out Georgia didn’t have one. I was like, wait a minute. And I remember coming back to the room and thinking, we have more tobacco retailers than any state in the United States and we don’t have a state association. No local representation. I said, ‘That’s why our taxes went up. Nobody is advocating here in the state.’ And I remember saying to my husband, ‘Well, babe, you know what, if I have to be the one to start it so that we know what’s going on at Smokehouse and so that I can protect us, then that’s what I’m going to have to do.’ We talked about it a bit more and when we got back, I actually went into planning mode and a year later, I got the Georgia State PremiumCigar Association started.” Getting involved and finding strength in numbers is essential for an industry like premium cigars. The more voices that defend the industry, the more secure premium cigar retailers will be. BACK HOME, WHAT NOW? So now you’re back home, a suitcase full of cigars, a stack of purchase order receipts and some vaguememories of dancing in a congo line. What now? For Hutson, she puts her clientele to work. “We’ll come home with up to 20 potentials and we have a tasting panel where we bring in customers that we trust and that have different palates to sample the cigars,” she says. “We do coffee and donuts with them in themorning, hand out cigars and we take notes froma list of questions we’ll ask. We’ll even ask howmuch they would pay for the cigar, because you can bring in a cigar that’s great, but if they’re telling you they’d only pay $7.50 for a $12 cigar, it’s probably not worth bringing it in. “This has been a great program for us: The customers enjoy feeling part of the decision-making process and if we bring in a cigar a customer recommends, that customer’s going to help sell the cigar to other customers because that’s their baby now.” Owens has discovered that her palate is different in Vegas than at home in Atlanta, so she’ll give the cigars time to adjust to the different environment and try many of them again. “For all retailers, I would definitely take into account the climate change, location change, all those things that affect how a cigar is going to smoke,” she says. “A lot of the sample cigars we got, I didn’t like in Vegas. But when we got home, after letting them sit and rest for a week, we tried them again and ended up ordering some because it was a totally different smoke once we got back to Georgia.” There’s a lot to consider at a trade show. You’re ingesting and digesting a huge amount of information while trying to make financial decisions that will impact your business. The more prepared you are, the more you’ll maximize the benefits of the show. And the more time you’ll have to truly enjoy the full experience of PCA 2021. N A V I G A T I N G T H E S H O W “Getting involved and finding strength in numbers is essential for an industry like premium cigars. The more voices that defend the industry, the more secure premium cigar retailers will be.”