Good Products in the Wrong Room Are Just Inventory
- The Cigar Profit
- Mar 27
- 9 min read
Grandfadda got me to TPE. Here's what I found when I looked at the rest of the portfolio -- and why the whole thing belongs on a premium cigar retail floor.
March 27, 2026 | Jonathan Lipson | The Cigar Profit Consulting
Let me tell you what the last article didn't.
(And if you haven't read it yet - here's the backstory: https://cgpr.cc/tpe26 )
The Grandfadda piece was about one product. One hard argument. One room full of people whose first instinct was going to be resistance before the conversation even started. It was about an electronic cigar, a premium cigar consultant taking the assignment anyway and what that decision revealed about an industry that asks for innovation and flinches every time it actually shows up.
That story landed.
But it was incomplete.
Because Grandfadda was the door.
Not the whole building.
When I told the story of why I was going to TPE 2026, I told the Grandfadda story. I told the JRL Marketing story -- why I'm building a second firm to serve regulated categories beyond premium cigars, why the strategic problems rhyme across tobacco, nicotine, alcohol and cannabis, why the same thinking that built The Cigar Profit applies to a broader set of industries selling to informed adults in constrained environments.
What I didn't tell was the rest of the VPR story.
VPR Brands carries a broader portfolio. But within that portfolio, three products are specifically engineered for the premium cigar category. Three products built around the ritual, the consumer and the moments that define it.
Grandfadda. Dissim. Fuego FIRE.
And that's what this article is.
Because I'm not at TPE just for Grandfadda.
I'm there for all three.
The argument for why all three belong on premium cigar retail floors is the same argument -- just wearing three different faces.
The Principle Behind the Pivot
There's a television show called Shark Tank. A panel of high-profile investors sits across from entrepreneurs who have built businesses and come looking for capital. Roughly fifteen minutes to make a case. The investors push, probe and when the numbers hold, they write checks.
The show has been running long enough that certain patterns have become predictable.
The most reliable one: the moment an entrepreneur mentions expanding from online sales into wholesale accounts or brick and mortar retail, the table reacts. Not thoughtfully. Reflexively.
Margins collapse in wholesale. Overhead kills you in retail. You lose control of the customer relationship. The unit economics that made the business attractive stop making sense.
Stay online. Stay lean. Don't complicate what's working.
That advice is right for a lot of companies.
VPR Brands, my newest client, isn't "a lot of companies".
They aren't a startup trying to find footing. They built something real. A portfolio of products with proven demand, established online channels and a distribution strategy that made complete sense for where they were.
The key phrase: where they were.
Because scale doesn't just change how a business runs.
It changes what a business can become.
And what VPR can become in premium cigar retail is something their current channel strategy was never designed to reach.
Why This Category Runs on Rooms, Not Feeds
Here's the part the Sharks don't have a framework for.
Premium cigar retail doesn't operate the way most consumer categories operate.
It doesn't run on algorithms. It doesn't run on targeted ads or subscription boxes or discovery platforms that surface products to consumers who didn't know they were looking.
It runs on rooms.
The tobacconist's lounge. The walk-in humidor. The counter where a man who has been selling cigars for twenty years picks up a product, turns it over in his hands and decides whether it belongs in his shop.
That decision isn't made on a screen.
It's made in person. Through touch. Through conversation. Through the accumulated judgment of someone whose entire professional reputation rests on whether the things he recommends are worth recommending.
The tobacconist is the gatekeeper of this category.
When he puts something in his case, he isn't just stocking a product. He's telling every customer who walks in: I looked at this, I thought about you and I decided it belongs here.
That endorsement can't be bought with a media placement or a well-curated subscription box.
It's earned. In person. Through the right product in the right room at the right moment.
VPR has been reaching the end consumer -- the cigar smoker who finds Dissim through an online search or a targeted feature -- without going through the person that consumer trusts most.
That's not a product problem.
That's a presence problem.
And presence problems have one fix.
You show up.
Dissim -- The Question the Whole Category Forgot to Ask
Every premium cigar lighter on the market was designed upright.
One position. One assumption. Decades of product development built on top of it without anyone stopping to ask whether the assumption was right.
It wasn't.
A cigar smoker doesn't hold his hands the way a cigarette smoker does. He angles the foot toward the flame. He rotates. He works the light across a surface that doesn't cooperate with a flame port designed to point straight at the ceiling.
He's been working around a tool that was never fully designed for him.
And he accepted it because nobody offered him anything different.
Dissim offered him something different.
The question was simple: what if the lighter worked the way the cigar smoker actually uses it?
The answer is a patented Circle Grip design that produces a consistent, controllable flame whether the lighter is held upright or fully inverted. Soft flame or torch. A lifetime warranty. A price point that sits exactly where serious premium cigar accessory buyers make decisions -- not disposable, not untouchable.
A daily carry lighter built around the reality of how a cigar gets lit.
Hand one to a tobacconist and let him hold it.
He gets it before you finish the sentence.
The B2B footprint exists. Dissim isn't starting from zero. Some premium cigar retailers carry it. It's been on the PCA floor.
But the brick and mortar presence is too light to have real impact.
Light distribution isn't the same as meaningful distribution. A product can exist in a handful of shops and still be invisible to the overwhelming majority of premium cigar consumers who would buy it the moment they held it.
That's where Dissim is right now.
The tobacconist who should be recommending it every day to every customer asking about lighters hasn't had someone stand in front of him and make the full case at volume.
TPE is where that changes.
Fuego FIRE -- An Old Idea Finally Meeting Its Rightful Owner
This one starts with a memory.
I'm a Xennial -- that odd slice of a generation caught between Gen X and Millennial, old enough to remember things that younger generations only read about and young enough to have watched them disappear in real time.
One of those things: the coil lighter built into every car dashboard.
You pressed it in. You waited. It came out glowing orange.
No flame. No moving parts. Nothing to refill. Pure resistance heat that worked in wind, worked in rain, worked anywhere without argument.
Those lighters go back well before the eighties -- standard in American cars for decades. But for people my age, they're a specific kind of memory. The click when you pressed it in. The glow when it was ready.
It didn’t matter if you were around smokers or not. You understood the coil lighter was for cigarettes.
And then the cigarette smoker moved on.
The coil disappeared.
But the socket stayed.
Every car built in the last fifteen years uses that same socket to charge a phone.
The coil lighter wasn't retired because the technology failed.
It was retired because the person it was built for changed.
One person didn't change.
Fuego took that coil and rebuilt it from scratch for the cigar smoker.
Here's the practical case -- and it's a short one because it doesn't need much explaining.
The foot of the cigar goes into the lighter. The heating element is recessed. The entire foot
lights at once. No rotation. No technique. No coaxing.
The whole foot. Simultaneously. Every time.
Pack it in your carry-on. No restrictions. No questions at the security line. No canister to declare or surrender. USB-C rechargeable -- the same charger already in your bag works.
Nothing to source. Nothing to run out of. Nothing to think about.
Fuego is the lighter that goes everywhere the cigar smoker goes -- including the places a traditional lighter can't follow.
The technology was never wrong.
It just took decades to find the right person and build the right version.
That person smokes cigars.
Grandfadda -- The Counter Conversation
Here's where tobacconists are going to get this wrong if the framing isn't right before the conversation starts.
Grandfadda Premium Electronic Cigars is going to look like a threat to someone who hasn't thought it through.
It isn't.
It's a counter product. Not a humidor product.
Those are two completely different conversations and two completely different parts of the shop.
The humidor is where the tobacconist's expertise lives. His relationships with blenders and manufacturers. His selection built over years of tasting, selling and understanding his customer.
Nothing about Grandfadda touches that.
Nothing about it competes for a purchase that was already going to happen.
The counter is different.
The counter is where add-on sales happen. Where the customer who just picked out a box asks what else he should know about. Where the shop captures revenue the humidor was never positioned to reach.
And right now, for a significant portion of that customer's cigar life -- the hotel stay, the venue that won't allow combustible products, the evening when the environment simply won't cooperate with a premium cigar session -- the counter has no answer.
The tobacconist sends that customer out the door without a solution for those moments.
Grandfadda is the solution for those moments.
Not a substitute for the premium cigar the customer loves. A complement to the ritual for the times the ritual can't reach.
Two formats -- a 4x58 and a 5x48 -- sitting in familiar territory for any cigar smoker who picks one up. Flavor profiles developed to evoke premium cigar character. A soft-touch mouthpiece. A red glow on the draw that echoes the visual language of a lit foot.
This was built by people who understood what they were stepping into.
The tobacconist who puts Grandfadda on his counter isn't compromising his shop.
He's answering a question his shop could never answer before.
That's an addition.
Not a subtraction.
What the Right Room Actually Does
Here's the real argument for premium cigar retail -- and it isn't complicated.
The cigar smoker's world is built around gatekeepers.
The tobacconist who knows his customer. Who has spent years building a shop around what that customer values. Who has earned the right to say: this belongs here.
That gatekeeper relationship is what makes premium cigar retail unlike almost any other category.
When a tobacconist puts Dissim or Fuego FIRE in his accessory case, he isn't just filling shelf space. He's solving a problem his customer didn't know could be solved differently. A lighter that works every direction. A lighter that goes anywhere he goes without a second thought.
Those aren't incremental improvements on what's already in the case.
They're genuinely novel solutions to problems the category accepted as permanent.
That's what gives the tobacconist something new to say. A reason to pull a customer toward the counter before he heads out the door.
A conversation that doesn't exist if the product isn't there.
And for Grandfadda -- it isn't a counter conversation about competition. It's a counter conversation about coverage.
The tobacconist who stocks Grandfadda is the one who has an answer for every moment in his customer's cigar life. Not just the ones that happen inside his lounge.
That's the upside.
Not disruption.
Coverage.
The shops that understand that first are the ones that build the deepest customer loyalty.
Because they're the ones that showed up for every moment -- not just the ones that were easy.
Where This Lands
This is why JRL Marketing is a natural extension of The Cigar Profit Consulting.
Not just for Grandfadda. Not just for one product with one hard argument to make.
For brands in regulated categories that have built something real in the wrong room and are ready to move it into the right one.
VPR Brands has three products that deserve a seat at the premium cigar retail counter. Because they solve real problems for a real consumer in a category that has been accepting friction as a given for too long.
Better accessories get people excited. They give the tobacconist something new to say to the customer who has heard every pitch in the humidor already. They give the consumer a reason to come back that has nothing to do with whether the new release is worth the markup.
And Grandfadda sitting on a counter doesn't cost the tobacconist a single cigar sale.
It captures transactions the shop was never reaching before.
That's not a complication.
That's growth.
The Sharks would look at VPR's current numbers and tell them to stay online. The unit economics are real. The channel works.
But the Sharks have never stood in a lounge while a tobacconist handed something to a regular and said: this one's different. Trust me.
TPE 2026 is where VPR starts building those moments at scale.
Booth 12024.
We'll be there.
/ / /
If you're a tobacconist, wholesaler or retail buyer at TPE -- the conversation about Grandfadda, Dissim and Fuego FIRE is worth ten minutes of your time. Find us at Booth 12024.
If your brand is sitting on real product in the wrong room and the ceiling is starting to show -- that's exactly the problem The Cigar Profit and JRL Marketing were built to solve.
Different products. One room. One shot to get it right.
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