Lighter
When I lived in Vietnam there was a shop on one of the main streets (Hai BA Trung) that sold nothing but Zippo lighters. Even in this day and age where everyone is against smoking, a nice lighter remains a conversation piece and is useful for many tasks apart from lighting the ubiquitous cigarette, pipe or cigar.
Sourcing will be key here and we will discuss it in the section on ：Where
do I get my Stock?； below. Assuming you have access to an interesting range
of lighters we suggest you market them as follows: -
EBay
Website
Network
Smoke Shops & Newsagents
Camping shops
With a nice range, EBay is an easy place to start, shipping is easy with light items just make sure that they are well padded with bubble wrap, or newspaper to ensure that they don・t get damaged in transit. You will be competing against significant numbers of advertisers, with over 20,000 listings and more than 4,000 listed as cigarette lighters.
Building a website is a natural next step, link your adverts on EBay to the website and start to promote your pages offline as well as online. Hand out business cards at every opportunity and use your stock publicly as often as possible, birthday cake at work? Be the one to light the candles. Family BBQ? Be the one to get the barbeque going, or at least hand over your lighter. A nice token would be to engrave the lighter you use with the website address and company logo so that people notice it when you lend it to them.
Networking is simply an extension of the above, making sure that absolutely everyone you meet knows that you are in the lighter business. ：High end, special models, affordable prices, make great gifts etc；. Be enthusiastic, people remember that and may come back to you weeks or months later when they are looking for a gift. Keep some stick in your car trunk, or better yet your briefcase. Lighters can also be an impulse buy and whilst a catalogue is nice you can・t sell a demonstrator to an impulsive customer if it is only shown in a picture.
If you want newsagents or smoke shops to carry your stock you are going to need to go in there and talk to the owner/operators. These are small businessmen just like you and they want to know whether they like you before they do anything for you, and then they want to know what you will do for them. Naturally your stock can be provided on consignment providing they can keep it safe. If they don・t have a solution then you may want to provide a lockable, counter top display cabinet at your expense. Bear in mind though that your stock needs to be affordable if you want them to shift a lot of units. You may also find yourself trudging around town to find just one or two stores willing to stock your goods.
Another possibility is camping stores, many already sell Swiss army type pen knives and sunglasses, so why not lighters. These tend to be chain shops but the key here will be the uniqueness of your stock. If you have nice looking wind proof lighters suitable for starting camping stoves in the wild then you stand a chance. You will need to find out the name of the buyer at head office and remember to lower your prices, if you can sell a lot more you don・t need to earn as much per item. This sounds obvious but I have recently had to point this out to two entrepreneurs who thought all the profit margin between retail price and cost was theirs!
Don・t run out and open a shop, the one I know in Saigon is a specialist in a unique market. If after a while you are confident that your market can justify a retail presence then go ahead, but run the numbers before you jump in.
Branded items are best but will carry less mark up. It is also possible to generate some interest by carrying some branded new items, some antique items and some new unbranded items. Many customers will leave feeling good with an item they could afford because they were initially interested in an item that was beyond their reach. This strategy worked for car manufacturers・ right through the 60s and 70s.
You can find stock online at www.alibaba.com or by searching on Google. Try to swot up on what is rare and appealing to collectors in case you come across any at yard sales or out of the way antique stores. Don・t buy bic or other disposable lighters as there is no mark up and this is not your market.
We are not allowed to play with fire which makes a nice lighter appealing to some demographics in the same way as knives or catapults. If you decide to advertise bear this in mind and aim for a young male demographic.
Be responsible and don・t sell lighters to those who are too young to smoke, they may not want the lighter for smoking but that・s not really the point.