If your vape shop doesn’t carry dry herb vaping supplies yet, this is a great time to start. Unless your vape shop began as a smoke shop and transitioned to e-liquid vaping, you’ve probably spent all of your time as a vape shop owner focusing on e-liquid vaping products and have never seriously considered expanding beyond those.
The times, however, are changing. The PMTA deadline for the e-liquid industry has come and gone, and the FDA’s stance on the matter is clear: The agency hasn’t approved a single product in any flavor other than tobacco and hasn’t approved a single bottled e-liquid in any flavor. At this point, it very much appears that all flavored e-liquids will eventually be gone. If you want your vape shop to continue existing after that point, you need to be thinking about alternative revenue streams right now.
The FDA’s stance on flavored e-liquids also matters to consumers who may one day lose access to all bottled vape juice. What are those people going to do when they can’t use refillable vaping devices anymore? Some of them will probably transition to the few Big Tobacco-sponsored vaping systems that the FDA has approved, but others will probably seriously consider going back to smoking.
If you ever reach a point where many of your customers begin to consider switching back to smoking, you’ll be in a position to offer them an alternative if you start planning now – you can tell them to consider using a dry herb vaporizer instead.
Why Sell Dry Herb Vaping Products in Your Vape Shop?
There are several good reasons to consider selling dry herb vaporizers in your vape shop. For one thing, they aren’t as tightly regulated as e-liquid vaping gear. Unlike e-liquid vaping products, dry herb vaporizers don’t have to go through the PMTA process before entering the market. There also haven’t been any rumblings suggesting that the FDA is considering attempting to ban them.
There’s also the cannabis angle. Although dry herb vaporizers can be used to vaporize and extract the nicotine from loose-leaf tobacco, their primary purpose is to vaporize cannabis. Although the federal government seems intent on cracking down on all alternative forms of nicotine use, the laws relating to cannabis have only become more permissive as time has gone by. Selling dry herb vaporizers means you’ll be joining an industry that’s growing instead of one that the government is trying to eliminate.
As a vape shop owner, you should be looking for as many alternative income streams as possible at this point. Selling dry herb vaping supplies is a great income stream that you should strongly consider. If you want to start selling dry herb vaping supplies in your vape shop, there are three product categories that you should consider carrying. Here’s what they are.
Dry Herb Vaporizers
If you want to sell dry herb vaping supplies in your vape shop, you’ll obviously need to carry vaporizers. This is an area where you should choose carefully because you don’t want to deal with customer returns that you can’t resell – and it’s pretty much impossible to resell a dry herb vaporizer that’s already been used. Poor-quality devices tend to use second-rate heating technology. They either don’t heat the material completely – which leads to waste – or they heat the material so much that they produce smoke. Both of those extremes will lead to a poor user experience. It really pays to source your devices from a high-end manufacturer like Rokin Vapes.
When you source dry herb vaporizers for your vape shop, it’s often best to deal directly with the devices’ manufacturers rather than third-party distributors. You’ll cut out the middleman that way and get better wholesale prices as a result. Even in the best of cases, though, dry herb vaping hardware will have lower profit margins just like vape mods. Much of your profit will come from accessories, and we’ll discuss those next.
Dry Herb Vaping Accessories
Dry herb vaping requires a lot of accessories, and that’s a good thing for you as a vape shop owner because the wholesale prices for herb vaping supplies are often much lower than the retail prices that you can charge. When people need things like replacement parts, they need them immediately – which means that you can often charge fairly high markups.
Here are some of the accessories that people will require for their dry herb vaporizers.
- Grinders: In order for a dry herb vaporizer to heat the material in its oven evenly and thoroughly, the material needs to be broken down before it’s loaded into the device. Loose-leaf tobacco is typically pre-shredded, but that’s not true of cannabis – so a grinder is a required accessory for cannabis vaping.
- Charging cables: Most dry herb vaporizers have built-in batteries. Therefore, a device is unusable if the charging cable breaks.
- Replacement parts: Every dry herb vaporizer has a variety of components – metal screens, silicone gaskets, glass stems and more – that eventually break and require replacement. You should stock all of the necessary replacement parts for every vaporizer that you carry.
- Cleaning kits: Every dry herb vaporizer requires frequent cleaning, and the cleaning process isn’t easy without the required accessories. Items like stiff brushes and alcohol wipes can be great profit generators for your vape shop.
Loose-Leaf Tobacco
If you’ve made the decision to start selling dry herb vaporizers in your vape shop, the final product that you should strongly consider stocking is loose-leaf tobacco. This might go against your ethos as a vape shop owner, but you need to make sure that your business is protected in the event that bottled e-liquid becomes impossible to obtain in the United States. People who switch from e-liquid vaping to dry herb vaping are going to want higher-quality tobacco than the canned stuff that’s available in convenience stores, and you’re in a position to meet that demand. Another benefit for you is that the wholesale prices for loose-leaf tobacco are often quite reasonable – so this can be another high-margin product for your vape shop.
Jason Artman is the owner and author of eCig One. A professional freelance writer and SEO consultant with more than a decade of experience, Jason works with vaping companies around the world to increase their targeted web traffic and improve their revenue.