Simon Devlin
speaker
125 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Simon Devlin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And then others would come in and their locker would be empty and they would just buy a cigar on consumption as well. But they had that... you know, and, and, you know, it gave us different things to sell as part of the membership and as part of the, because I have an event center that we're launching and it's like a library museum thing.
Yeah. Or we could do a JV and I could sell cigars and they could put some cigars in there.
Yeah. And, um, and we started adding in different products to our store as well. It went from being a cigar shop to a men's luxury gift store where we were selling writing instruments and beautiful writing instruments and, um, We were selling, you know, luggage and wallets and, you know, great things like that.
So it really evolved into being what I call a big boys toy store but still always had a heavy focus on the cigars. But the beauty of cigars is actually the toys that go along with it. You know, the different cutters and lighters and humidors and they're just beautiful accessories as well. So we started selling all of those products as well and then just kept adding to the membership.
And realizing that we could keep adding membership levels and then our members would want to ascend. Now, because we did the experience and the engagement part so well... They just love hanging out there, and it's become quite an incredible community. We're just an amazing bunch, predominantly men, though women are incredibly welcome as members, and we do have some fantastic ladies as members.
It tends to be that it's the men that generally enjoy the cigars more just by their nature. But, yeah, we've got an amazing, amazing group of members there. So what do the levels look like? What do you charge these levels? What are people getting at these levels? Yeah, so it's evolved over time. So first of all, there's a joining fee. So we charge a joining fee.
So the joining fee is currently $995. and then there's the different levels. So we've actually changed it recently. So we used to have a bronze level of membership, but we've done away with that. And we actually, the opening level of membership is a gold level of membership. And with that, they get their private cigar keep.
They actually get a 10% discount on everything in the, in the store as well. And they also, we added things into the stack, which are from outside vendors, which is a really, really good thing. So if you go to this restaurant, you get, you know, an entree, you know, if you go here, you get that, or you get access to a private dining room or you get access to different
things as well, which we found was really, really valuable to add in, uh, to the stack as well. Uh, so that's gold. They pay around about $1,600 a year. Uh, then we have our platinum. Um, so they get everything obviously that's in gold. Um, plus they actually get a whiskey keep. So actually, so the cigar keeps this to walk in humidor rooms with, uh,
private cigar keeps so there's now 500 private cigar keeps we started out with you know um uh 60 um and the platinum members actually get a whiskey keep as well which is actually inside the lounge so that is a keep which actually has like a um like a mesh to the front of it and it's lit up and so you can see what bottles they can all see what bottles
they have in their in their keep and they can keep whiskey in there or wine or or soft drink whatever you know we uh we obviously don't mind on that um but they also get four platinum member lunches a year which are special lunches that we actually host in the lounge itself which And they're just fantastic. They're some of my favorite events. Just a great bunch of guys.
We now have about 100 platinum members. But it started out as a very, very small group. And they are fantastic days where we have three cigars and we have a huge amount of food, a lot of barbecue, American-style barbecue stuff as well. Got a great guy, Barbecue Events Australia. They look after us. Amazing. And... a little bit of wine, a little bit of whiskey as well.
And, of course, now we've made it kind of a sales event where we have a particular raffle item, which will be something really, really special, hard to get or you can't get. If you purchase a certain amount of boxes of cigars on the day, you can actually go into the drawer for that as well. And you get a platinum member's jacket, which is a smoking jacket, which is really cool.
And, of course, you get a platinum member's pin and, you know, We follow the formula, the platinum members pin and platinum members card as well. All those things which are really, really important. And then we have platinum plus, which is, sorry, platinum doesn't have the jacket. Platinum plus has the jacket.
Again, different card, a couple of other different events as well, which are even more exclusive because there's only a 30 or 40 of those. And finally, we have our membership that we launched this year, which actually – it actually came to me in the mastermind meeting with Dan. And – It was like I was telling him about all the memberships and all the rest of it, and he's asking questions.
I'm like, oh, yeah, there's a waiting list for platinum, waiting list for platinum plus. And he goes, you know what that means, right? And I go, yeah. And he goes, your membership's too cheap. You need another level. So we just created a Devlin's Black. And that's $10,000 a year. And we wanted to make that really extra special. So we didn't actually market that.
I literally came to – I hand-selected the people that I wanted in that very, very small group of 15. And I went and invited them individually. And they get a beautiful Devlin's Black card, which is a metal card.
they get access to things that other people don't get access to for example Teresa my partner and I we go to a or get invited every year to a special cigar dinner which is in LA which is hosted by Joe Mantegna the actor and Andy Garcia and for their foundation and it's a bit of a who's who of Hollywood Arnie was there last year like it's a it's a pretty special event it's a cigar thing and
we've been lucky enough to get invited and we're like, okay, so if you're a Devlin's Black member, you are going to get a golden ticket to this event. You get to get your way from Australia and your accommodation and all the rest of it, but you get to come with us.
And we took our first group in early September and they just had the most incredible time as well, which just cements that whole relationship as well. Yeah.
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