Quote:
Originally Posted by wayner123
Another thought I had is this; From what I can gather, in order for a B&M to get sent Opus X, they must be a Fuente retailer. And again, from what I have gathered, to be a Fuente retailer, one must carry all of the lines of Fuente. That's a lot of product and cost for a B&M to carry for the chance of getting sent Opus twice a year. So it might be that the reason there are less shops that have Opus, is because the Boutique brands are putting out great quality smokes and not requiring such cumbersome retail tactics.
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That's pretty close to how Mark Just, "NorCalMark", the owner of Tower Cigars told it when we were talking about Opus X distribution once. There's an extra account level that a shop has to have to get Opus X, in addition to being a Fuente account, they have to be an Opus X authorized account. Mark / Tower has been an Opus X premiere account since the Opus X was first released and yes, you do have to sell such-and-such volume of certain certain lines to get others. For a long time, very few Opus X accounts were being added, so accounts typically got good quantities of cigars. All of a sudden, Fuente authorized more accounts, but production didn't seem to change much, so all of a sudden, accounts were now only getting a few boxes of cigars.
As for boutique cigar brands, actually a lot of them do have multiple levels of accounts and somewhat similar sales quotas which determine what a retailer can get from their line.