Great News. I talked to the bean counters over here we are going to be able to turn this forum blending concept into a full time, ongoing activity. This first one was a great experiment. Here is how it is going to work. Bear with me as we probably wont get started on the next blend until January but after that we should be able to do about 4 a year.

We are going to band and box the first blend in a size of your choosing. However, the goal for the forum blending project will be to do several every year. I need input from the group though on how you want it to be set up since this is being made just for you guys.

Here is what I was thinking to get us started:

A. Fist order of business decide on a name. While printing bands did not make sense when we did not know if this would be an ongoing thing, printing them up now makes sense since I can just print a bunch and we can use them on all of the blends going into the future. That said, to differentiate each blend we will order these in boxes only and have the main logo done in Cliche on the lid and have the generation number but on it in screen print. For example, if we call the brand Catadores, the first one we make in January will have the Catadores band and be in a box of 20 that has the logo on the lid. Below the logo it would say "First Edition" or "First Generation". The second blend we do in the spring would have the same exact band and same box but say "Second Generation". We will bring in a set number of boxes for each generation and add them to the brands page. When they sell out, they are gone forever. Most likely I will only bring in 100 boxes of each generation until it grows and justifies more buying. Also, the cigars will only be purchasable in boxes as I need to keep them in tact since it will be hard for my warehouse crew to tell them apart once I open boxes since the bands are all the same. That said, boxes will relatively cheap at $89.95 ($4.50 per cigar) for a box of 20. If guys want to do splits etc, that is up to you.

B. For the next round, I will create a special sub section of the forum dedicated to discussing the blend and will create a special part of cigar.com dedicated to the project. Here there will be a a copy of the thread on the current blend (similar to the thread on the daily cigar deal site), an area to vote on the poll for that week: IE: wrapper, body, size, filler, binder, etc. It will also show results from the prior weeks votes so everyone can follow along. The polls and voting areas will be set up much more professionally with check lists etc and I will have my IT team dedicate some time to getting it set up.

C. We will need to limit each blend to just one size.

With that lets discuss what you guys think. Do these terms sound good? Did I miss anything? What about factory? Do you want to stay with just one factory or do we want to move it around each time to different factories? Perhaps that is the first poll each time we start a blend, which factory. Lets start discussing. In the mean time, we really need to finalize the name for this thing and I need an answer of size for the first generation blend so I can get them ordered and in house by Jan 1 which is when I hope we can start working on the Second Generation blend and have the site set up.

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Alex Svenson
Chief Merchant
Cigar.com