We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful David Heymann. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with David below.

David , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?

Oh man, where to start. My brother and I were initially very interested in building a treehouse resort in the Blue Ridge, GA area. To start off, this was just one of those things we dreamed about, but in reality, would likely never happen.

We enjoyed the daydreaming aspect of the idea, and eventually we took a few day trips to the area to look at properties to see what might be feasible. We walked through a few properties that we for sale, and even a few that weren’t by accident, but we couldn’t really find anything amazing. My brother Andy called me one day and said, “Dave, I just really want to find a waterfall, we should totally build this on a waterfall.” I laughed it off and agreed with Andy. My thoughts were, of course, everyone wants a waterfall! But there is zero chance we can find that. But being the good brother that I am, I went on Zillow and entered the keyword, Waterfall, and searched the Blue Ridge, GA area. I was astonished to find an amazing 25-acre property that bordered Fall Branch Falls that had been for sale for almost a year. The moral of the story here is sadly, your older brother knows best!

So, we went to see the property, and immediately fell in love. As soon as we made it back to cell service, we called the agent and put in an offer. This was the easy part.
Next, we had to figure out how to get this idea permitted with the county, funded, and built. Holy cow was this ever a journey. Two years later, a switch from treehouses to domes, an unknown number of hurdles, setbacks, and mistakes, we opened Glamp Blue Ridge.

After being open for a little under two months we have received over 250 bookings and have had amazing feedback from our guests. We are still solving problems almost on a daily occurrence but are loving every second of it!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My background is in automotive finance, and my brother is a graphic designer for Snapchat. So we are pretty much the ideal to build a Glampsite in North Georgia (heavy sarcasm)!

We pride ourselves on our abilty to solve problems, and to be able to push to a solution. In building this dream into a reality, we used the motto, “Suprise and Delight”. We felt that if we could deliver these feelings to our guests in all aspects of our business we would have a strong chance of success.

Even in operations, we continue to push this motto. It is not uncommon for a guest to get a personal phone call from an owner literal seconds after sending an email. We strive to answer any and all questions as fast as possible. We will truly bend over backwards to make our guests happy.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

We built Glamp Blue Ridge during COVID. This provided countless challenges, but one I dearly, or not so dearly, remember is the price of lumber going through the roof.

As we began building our giant decks for each dome, they kept getting more and more expensive as the price of lumber was increasing every day. Also, the terrain on our property got steeper as we went along, which meant taller supports for our decks. I think it was when we were building deck 3 or 4 when I got a call from our builder. He informed me we would need to use 35ft 8x8s for some of the front deck supports. The lead time was 12 weeks, and the cost was $1,500 per piece. Needless to say, the time or cost didn’t really work with our plans. We decided to lean on any resource for assistance we could find. I ended up calling an old friend from high school who was a sales rep for 84 lumber. He suggested looking into telephone poles. There was zero chance we would have ever gotten to this on our own, but it worked out. Our engineer approved the change, and we found a local power utility about an hour away that had a ton in stock! The best part is that they were only $191.

How’d you meet your business partner?

My business partner is my brother Andy. Guess what brothers are great at? Arguing! We certainly had our fair share of loud and passionate discussions while planning and building Glamp Blue Ridge. There was a great one where we were discussing the cookware for the domes – it almost came to blows. But it really is because we both care so much. Looking back, we both loved building the business. I am proud to borrow a saying that Sierra Nevada uses – We are family owned and argued over.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.glampblueridge.com
• Instagram: glampblueridge_ga
• Facebook: Glamp Blue Ridge