PCA Magazine Summer 2022

PREMIUMCIGARS.ORG VOLUME 3 2022 | PCA The Magazine 47 a retailer of premium tobacco products, you probably have, in addition to a full array of fine cigars and accessories, a selection of briar, meerschaum or corncob tobacco pipes, or possibly you have all three. If so, ask yourself this question: Do you sell pipes? In other words, you may carry pipes, but do you actually sell pipes? There’s an important distinction between those two statements—a gap between stocking and selling; and in that gap can be found the tools of product knowledge and salesmanship. Understanding this can mean the difference between enjoying the profits of pipe and tobacco sales and sitting on dead inventory. Knowing how to sell a pipe implies an understanding of how pipes are made, what materials are used for pipe production, and the techniques for properly filling, lighting and smoking, in addition to knowing what makes certain pipes better than others. Those essential subjects will be addressed in subsequent issues of this magazine, but first we’ll address the art of knowing how to attract pipe customers and how to sell to them. Currently, most pipes are purchased online. Like most businesses, retail tobacco has shifted from storefront to website over the last decade or so. Brick and mortar merchants may point to this fact to bolster their arguments that “pipes don’t sell,” but the reality is that those same merchants are equally responsible for the paucity of pipe sales in their stores. There are multiple reasons for this. Many readers of this journal know pipes well. However, the popularity of cigars has drawn new players into tobacco retail, sellers who might benefit from adding more pipe knowledge and merchandise to their businesses. For many retailers, one principal impediment to successful pipe sales is a lack of motivation. To those who entered the industry principally as purveyors of cigars, it’s hard to dispute that cigars sell better than pipes. Also, cigars have quicker turnover, while offering comparable profit margins to pipes and tobacco. And cigar smokers enter a store knowing what they want, so there’s much less effort involved in making the sale. Conversely, pipe smokers are more contemplative, and tend to take longer to make a purchase. As a result, many retailers simply choose to avoid pipe smokers, or not even deal with them at all. But catering to pipe smokers can yield its own set of rewards. According to Jeremy McKenna, president of Sutliff Tobacco Co., “Pipe smokers as a whole are very loyal. They’re loyal to their shop, and loyal to the industry that takes care of them, because they know it’s not a huge industry.” He also points out that a pipe smoker who smokes your house brand pipe tobacco has to return to your store to buy it. That loyalty to your tobacco business can result in additional sales as well. McKenna says, “Through surveying we’ve done, when we talk to retailers, 70 to 80 percent of pipe smokers are what we call poly-users, meaning that they use other forms of tobacco, and that ‘other tobacco’ is premium cigars.” This creates the opportunity for add-on sales: “If the shop down the street B Y L A R R Y W A G N E R How to sell pipes for fun and profit As