How Cigar Club grew 5x using Wayflyer funding

In 2017, Jeff Zeiders had an idea. He wanted to create a curated cigar subscription company for men. His vision was to create an experience where someone could come to his website, answer a few questions, and then receive a curated set of cigars each month based on their personal palate.

Jeff named his new business Cigar Club and launched it as a side hustle in 2017.

Cigar Club started to take off and a few months later Jeff went full time as CEO. As the months went by, Jeff managed to attract more and more customers and it was clear he had tapped into a great market.

As the company grew, Jeff was always looking for new opportunities. In early 2020, he was considering an opportunity to manufacture a new line of products. But his suppliers needed a minimum order of 30,000 units (and for Jeff to pay up front for the order).

Jeff was excited about the opportunity but didn’t have the cash on hand to be able to pay for the order.

That’s when he first started talking to Wayflyer. With Wayflyer, he was able to quickly get the funds he needed to make the order. Jeff got his 30,000 units and was able to sell them all at a substantial gross profit, making it very easy for him to afford the repayments to Wayflyer.

This contributed to the huge growth Jeff saw for his business in 2020, where his sales grew 5x over 2019. “Wayflyer has made things possible for us that would have been very hard to do without them”, says Jeff.

Jeff is focused on building a family of brands that all serve the same customer base with curated services and has been acquiring other companies in the space. He sees a big opportunity to provide a wide range of curated services to his target customer group and to get efficiencies by bringing operations, marketing and customer service all under one roof.

To build this family of brands, Jeff knows he will need to have cash available. Jeff has been able to use Wayflyer funding to serve his working capital needs (inventory and marketing) freeing up cash for making acquisitions.

With a deep understanding of his target market, and a successful track record in acquiring and building brands, Jeff is incredibly excited about what the future holds for him and his team.

What I like about Wayflyer is the real flexibility of the funding, especially how we get the funds sent directly to our account and we are free to use it as we want. They're flexible and fair.