The 2014 IPCPR Trade Show is now history. Once again, we have brought you unprecedented coverage pre-show, at the show, and post show. Throughout that coverage you will see product-centric coverage of what to expect from the manufacturers. In this month’s column, I briefly reflect a little more on the show itself.
First off, hats off to the IPCPR for putting on an outstanding show. From our point of view, this show operationally went off very well. Given that IPCPR was without a CEO for most of the year, and given the industry is in the fight of their life against the FDA, IPCPR deserves a lot of credit.
While I cannot speak for all, I personally found the show environment friendly toward the media from both the manufacturer and IPCPR Staff standpoint. I found both parties to be very supportive of the Cigar Coop / Stogie Geeks efforts to cover the trade show, and myself and the team appreciate it.
There is a feeling that attendance was down. Some say it seemed like less traffic because of the larger floor. On the flip side some manufacturers will say they had less traffic and / or they wrote up less orders. I think it was a combination of the two, but this is more of my gut feel as I don’t have empirical numbers.
Overall I thought there was a really good batch of cigars that came out of the show. There was less cigars that you wanted to put down and a lot more you wanted to keep on smoking. This tells me the quality of the product. Over the next few weeks we will start assessing these cigars on Cigar Coop and Stogie Geeks.
