The marketplace
Brands submit their catalogs, and the platform matches them into one common set that lounges and members browse. Large and small brands get the same shelf, and the lounge stops chasing relationships one at a time.
CASE STUDY
The Smokist
A multi-tenant platform connecting cigar lounges, their members and the brands they stock. Built from nothing and still growing.
[HERO SCREENSHOT — member portal]
1200 × 760 or larger
The problem
A cigar lounge is three businesses at once: a membership club, a retail humidor and usually a bar. The software market serves none of that well. Lounges end up running memberships in a spreadsheet, locker rentals in a notebook, events on social media and retail through a point-of-sale system that knows nothing about any of it.
Meanwhile the brands whose product fills the humidor have no direct line to the members who actually smoke it, and every lounge owner spends time maintaining brand relationships one at a time instead of running their lounge.
Three surfaces, one platform
Separating these early was the architectural decision everything else hangs off.
The portals
Member, lounge-admin and vendor views over shared data, with an internal operations portal behind them. The member portal carries a design system that themes each venue's color, type and identity without a fork.
The lounge sites
Each lounge gets a custom public site on its own domain, with its member portal on an app subdomain of that same domain. The lounge keeps its identity and its traffic; the platform does the work underneath.
What the member portal does
- Membership and dues
- Events and RSVPs
- Check-in
- Locker and humidor tracking
- Lounge community
- Member communications
- Catalog browsing
- Pickup and shipping
- Point-of-sale integration
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