It's hard to know which of these posts to jump in on, but I'll try to address a few of the points I'm seeing here...
People are upset, they have every right to be upset, and nothing I say can, or is intended to change that. Be polite to each other, but moderators, no one has to be polite to me. It's literally while I'm. Yes, to provide some context, which is always going to read like damage control. But instead of venting into void or some anonymous corporate inbox, you can vent or ask questions to the actual person who said to STG: This is what we should do with the Sutliff portfolio.
Nothing about this has been easy or fun, and there is also nothing anyone can say that is going to offend me.
Regarding STG being more engaged with the pipe smoking community, I 100% agree. And from 2012 to about 2020 I was. I was at pretty much every pipe show up until Covid. I was less active here starting about 2015 because we started another online community. In 2018 the company shifted Max Stokkebye from my marketing team to be STG's first 100% dedicated pipe tobacco brand ambassador. He might have been less active here, but spent 40 weeks a year traveling and hosting events at local B&Ms.
But it's true that since Covid we haven't been anywhere near as engaged. Multiple reasons for that. I was running a separate division (focused on hemp, of all things), and more recently Max moved back to his native Denmark.
Everyone's roles where switched around again this past June, and since then Max and I have been pretty much exclusively focused on assessing the combined STG/Mac Baren pipe tobacco and roll-your-own portfolios. You can expect us to be more engaged in 2025.
