Buyers Guides

The golf industry has taken its lumps over the past decade, but one dynamic company with a creative vision is bucking the retail trend with a story of success and growth that truly stands out. Club Champion Golf has risen to become the No. 1 premium club fitter, builder and retailer of the best brands in golf including Callaway, TaylorMade, Ping, Titleist, PXG, Fujikura, Golf Pride and many more. Offering premium service and an unrivaled product selection, the company has driven average annual same store sales growth in excess of 50 percent and is planning to open a minimum of 30 stores over the next two years.

The company delivers a Tour-quality fitting experience with over 35,000 hittable head and shaft combinations. According to Club Champion CEO Joe Lee, “The results speak for themselves. Our golf club fittings produce longer, more accurate shots with nearly a 100 percent satisfaction rating for golfers of any caliber.” Unlike traditional retailers that carry inventory and face significant price pressure, golf clubs that Club Champion fits and builds for a golfer are unique. Operating with a “just in time” inventory system, inventory needs are minimal. Because their product is fitted or tailored and can’t be replicated on the internet, they don’t compete against web-based retailers on price. As a result, the company is one of the fastest growing retailers in golf with 2017 overall revenue growth near 100 percent. Founder and master club fitter, Nick Sherburne, was 16 when he joined Willowbrook, Illinois-based EJL Custom Golf, a small golf club fitting, repair and building business. An entrepreneur and passionate golfer, Sherburne enjoyed the club-building side of business. Innovations in club-fitting technology and launch monitors created a desire in him to combine the latest advances in a way that would dramatically improve a golfer’s game. By April of 2010, Sherburne had joined forces with Joe Lee and Keith Bank of KB Partners, a Chicago based venture capital firm. Lee was a former NCAA Division 1 golfer at Marquette University. A marketing and sales leader, Lee had a successful career in the technology arena and took the helm as Club Champion’s CEO while Sherburne spearheaded operations. The new team looked at the business and changed operational systems, fitting technology and putting analysis capability. They also made Club Champion studios more visually appealing. The next year was spent upgrading and optimizing the Club Champion model. By the end of January 2018, the company had 28 locations in major markets across the country with plans to add 11 more by this summer.

The company targets locations in communities with a heavy saturation of golfers. The typical store footprint is approximately 3,000 square feet and includes two fitting bays equipped with TrackMan launch monitors, a SAM PuttLab, a build shop and features an extensive equipment wall with more choices than any other retail chain.

Sherburne says, “The shaft wall, coupled with our master fitters’ knowledge, is where a lot of the magic happens.” A premium club fitter will have many more options available. At Club Champion, they offer more than 35,000 hittable head and shaft options from all the major brands, plus numerous other exotic offerings. Club Champion also stands out because they actually build clubs in-house, to exacting, unrivaled tolerances. Variables such as swing weight, length, lie and flex definitely alter performance.

The experience and know-how in combining these intricate parts together is what separates Club Champion from its competition. At Club Champion, master fitters go through more than 150 hours of training including monthly product training and testing. They must pass rigorous testing before they can be certified. As opposed to other retail locations, fitting is all that these people do. Equipment manufacturers hold back nothing with their praise for Club Champion. TaylorMade CEO David Abeles commented, “Club Champion truly is one of the most innovative club fitters in the business. They provide a consumer experience that is undeniably helpful for all golfers to play better. We couldn’t be more thrilled with our partnership with Club Champion.”

Callaway CEO Chip Brewer confirmed, “Club Champion is a fantastic consumer experience. One of the great, new age golf retailers who understands that fitting is the future in how you can benefit a golfer.” Adds Lee, “Other people sell golf clubs, we sell improvement. We not only solve golfers’ equipment problems, but we show and explain why each particular piece of equipment (shaft, head and grip) works for their unique swing.”

www.clubchampiongolf.com

Ask any male golfer about his underwear (if you dare), and he’ll tell you that comfort, breathability and support will all be high on his list. That’s why 2Undr should strike his fancy, big time.

The skivvies of 2Undr — a Canadian company whose name is not a variation on the Aussie phrase, but rather borrowed from the motocross community, whose common credo is keeping “two wheels under” you at all times — check off each of those three boxes beautifully. Their three-inch trunk, six-inch boxer brief and nine-inch long leg inseams come in a half dozen styles depending on fabric mix, with the lenzing-modal fabric mix in Swingshift and the lenzing-mod-al-cotton Dayshift leading the way, followed by “Nightshift,” “Gearshift,” “Powershift” and “Longjohn” styles made from nylon, poly or bamboo cotton.

In every configuration and length, all 2UNDR briefs put a premium on comfort, whether it’s in the moisture repelling department or in the oft-overlooked waistband zone.

“Our modal fabric resists hard water deposits, it won’t shrink, it won’t fade,” says Jack Curry, who heads up the company’s U.S. sales. “For a golfer that’s really big, but more importantly we men have two waistbands — one on the outside, on the inside. The band on the inside is usual-ly digging in by the end of the day but these are nice and smooth, so you’re not going to feel this at all.”

All include what’s called the Joey Pouch, which lends extra support to a guy’s “most valuable assets” while eliminating the skin contact that leads to chafing, as well as the No Drip Tip that wicks away moisture and lets the air in.

Why Joey Pouch? Curry explains.

“It’s why so many people think we’re an Aussie company,” he says. “Joey jumps in Mommy’s pouch so he can be se-cure, so why can’t I take your assets and put them in a pouch?

We like to say the twigs and berries are off the tree now.”

He then shows what else makes the Pouch so special.

“We’ve got a mesh in there made of hydrophobic material that pulls the moisture away,” he says, adding with a wink, “This is for the young kids who forget to shake and for the old men that can’t stop shaking.”

Special “flatlocked” stitching and a roll-resistant waist-bands just jack up the comfort level. The 2Undr family comes in dozens of colors and patterns, some of them downright inspired and often of the double-entendre variety, from a Jamaican-themed Cool Runnings to Night Camo to Running of the Bulls.

“The original solid colors continue to sel, but then we started going with with patterns and designs. This year Chinese New Year is starting for us,” Curry said during the PGA Show. “We’re gonna do it every year in January. The show last year was the year of the rooster, so we put white roosters all over that style. Now it’s the year of the dog, so we have weiner dogs, little dachsunds.”

2UNDR is carrying over some of their most-requested patterns — most of them designed by a guy named Rocky, formerly with Ogio  — to its lines of socks and luggage. Their new T-shirts, both long- and short-sleeved, offer plenty of stretch room. Everything is on target to start selling by late spring.

Meanwhile, 2UNDR is growing its collection of official NCAA team colors, and the Phoenix Suns have signed on with a direct order of their team colors outside the NBA auspices. Though, to us, it’s only a matter of time for the entire league follows suit.

All in all, demand for 2UNDR’s segment-busting product is on the definite rise. As is our, uh, enthusiasm for this fun and functional foundational garment.

www.2undr.com | Check The Price On Amazon!

Any product that has the backing of Pebble Beach Director of Instruction Laird Small — as well as legendary putter builder and fitter David Edel — is automatically on our “Best Of” radar, and the BioMech putting sensor definitely makes the grade.

The small, lightweight gadget, which attaches to the underside of putter shaft just below the grip and out of sight at address, picks up every metric that matters to instructors and students yearning to perfect their strokes: Face angle going back, through and at impact, change in loft at impact, club path, rhythm and target line length. It’s all gathered in real time, with stats uploading to an app immediately for review by player and coach, whether they’re on the practice green or the course.

“We can actually see what their habits are on the golf course on a six-foot breaking putt or a 40-footer,” Small says, “and you can actually see and track that stuff right away. So for the player and for the teacher it’s invaluable information because you’re going from a multi-site environment to a one-shot environment.”

Adds BioMech CEO John Douglas, “we’ve created a very high-tech platform with the highest quality components that we could muster in this form factor — the sensor only weights an ounce — that would allow for real time analysis and real time feedback. We’re also able to distinguish how one putter performs differently from another. We can tell immediately what works better for someone, and they’re able to see the data right in the spot.”

For Edel, the BioMech sensor made immediate sense.

“I’ve been in putting for 21 years. There’s a lot of processes and products that companies come up with, but I’ve known John for a long time and he said, ‘Hey, I’ve got something special. You just take a look at it.’ I got on the front end of this; I’m in the mentoring process with not only the product but the team.”

Edel said that their work, along with input from the professionals now using it, will get turned into “an actual program or a change to an app, that so we can track and understand things that we had been wanting to have happen.”

After years of chasing the right numbers with larger, heavier, more cumbersome and hard-to-calibrate systems, Edel is bullish on what this tiny piece of technology can do.

“Other attempts to do this had been really quite weak. The power of this sensor, the amount of information it’s grabbing — the team is able to take all that diagnostic information and put it into a platform that allows me as a fitter or a teacher, to make changes.

“I fit putters to aim, but a putter is two things: and emotion system and alignment system. [With a mis-fitted putter] golfers make consequential deviations to make a putt. Then they get my putter, which hits it straight, but the compensations no longer help them go into the hole. So once they stick with it and go, ‘OK, now I can release or do whatever I wasn’t able to do before,’ this will allow that player to understand what they’ve been doing wrong, and what they can do to fix it — to continually stay in that zone.

“This is just phenomenal not only for me as a business, but for people who buy my putters. The core value to Edel Golf is to make people better golfers. Why wouldn’t I be involved with something like that?”

Small, who’s as techno-savvy and stat-seeking a teacher as there is in America today, BioMech opens a window into a student’s true progress with the most important club in the bag. Numbers don’t lie, but he’s never been privy to these kinds of numbers before.

“We can actually track and see how you actually progress within those parameters set by the teacher or even by the student themselves — ‘OK, here’s where I was, and now here’s how I see myself moving towards the direction of where I’d like to be.’

“Golfers are crazy and, as you know, what happens is instead of staying on the path towards a particular outcome, we change because, well, this feels a little better here or this feels better there. The best putters don’t change. The best golfers don’t change. They stay repetitive and they stay consistent and they realize that it may not be an emotional thing that’s causing them to change. We go after their factual state of what actually is happening and how the putter is moving. Then they can start to have more confidence or trust in what they’re doing because confidence is an emotion, and that leads to building skills.

“This sensor helps to qualify and narrow those skills sets.”

Edel takes it up another notch. “Once you say, ‘I’m putting the best I’ve ever putted’ and have a baseline of what you know you did, you can create a reference putt with that and work on stay-ing towards that reference — or even getting better.”

The BioMech sensor is $300, and its app works on all iOS and Android devices. A player subscription to the “Real Time AIM” cloud service is $200 per year or $20 per month. The instructor subscription is $500 and $50.

www.biomechsports.com/golf

Who doesn’t want to spin that little pill like Phil, only to see what seems like his or her best wedge shot skitter across the green into a bunker or simply roll too darned far to leave a decent putt for par? Sure, it takes talent and scads of practice to truly master those delicate shots from within 100 yards, but the brand new Indi Golf StingRay wedge proves that equipment has something to do with it, too. A lot, in fact.

Rob Lang has worked in the golf club industry for years, gaining expertise especially in the wedge design game. So he decided to put his chops into his own StingRay wedges — one square-grooved and non-conforming to USGA rules, making it perfect for the casual player, and the conforming “TT” or Tournament model. Both offer increased spin, optimized launch and improved control thanks to grooves that run the entire length of the face, what Lang calls an “aggressive sand blast finish” and a “ScoopBack” design that optimized face thickness in every section across the head, so even off-center strikes produce wicked spin. There’s more thickness higher on the face, for instance — a spot many amateurs tend to hit the ball. The wedges’ weighting stabilizes the head at impact to fight twisting.

“We did a ton of research,” Lang said as he demo’d his new spinmasters at the PGA Show. “We wanted our wedges to grip the ball but not tear the ball up. We wanted it to grab the ball, launch it a little lower but with more ballspeed, so the person ends up flying it a little further, but then it stops.”

Lang’s starting point was not with the grooves, but with the wedges’ ScoopBack technology. “Most wedges get really thin at the top, so if you catch one high on the face you lose all the energy and spin. With our wedge, with its extra thickness, we shortened the hosel a bit and moved the CG to the middle of the face, which helps with stability through impact. If you mishit it doesn’t twist as much.”

Then came the grooves, the square versions of which aren’t legal for competition but a boon for every casual golfer. “We spent a lot of time figuring out what was the best groove configuration, and added a very aggressive sandblast,” Lang added. “And once it’s broken in, it maintains its spin. On a traditional wedge, once the grooves are broken in, it loses a lot of spin. Players like Jordan Spieth replace their wedges every three to four weeks because they want that spin.”

The StingRay wedges are forged from 8620 carbon steel for soft feel; plus, Lang says, “we wanted to be able to bend it a bit and make adjustments as needed for each individual; we want every person to have the best experience possible.”

Another design element that’s different from anything else out there: The grooves extend all the way to the perimeter of the club.

“Most amateur players miss it toward the toe, so why not have grooves out there? You won’t have nearly as much energy loss,” Lang said. His internal testing showed his wedges producing the kind of spin that most weekenders only dream about. “Tour pros get 10,000 rpm spin from 60 yards out. With our wedges, amateurs, who average 5,000 to 8,500 rpm, get there as well — a 50 to 100 percent increase in spin. The additional grooves on the StingRay take place of the extra texture other companies put onto their faces, accounting for about a 25 percent increase in spin. Even our conforming wedge produces about 25 percent more spin.”

So, do Lang’s assertions bear out on the field of battle? Golf Tips put three versions of the Stingray through their paces — square-grooved 52- and 58-degree models and a 56-degree TT model with conforming grooves — and came away, well, blown away, especially on full and three-quarter swings at purposely hard golf balls. We knocked them onto grass both thick and thin, bare dirt, greens themselves …and every ball stopped on the proverbial dime, or better yet, displayed that Philly Mick big-hop-and-pull-back move that we all love to watch on TV, even on thin or off-center strikes. The grin-inducing grip powers stuck around for even the most gentle chip and pitch, too; in fact, balls not hit target-length would pull up short. The StingRay takes the well-worn “take dead aim” philosophy and makes it a close-range reality.

“The feedback we’ve gotten from testers is that this wedge simplifies the game,” Lang said. “They can just fly it to the hole and it’ll stop. If you play in a lot of tourna-ments, you can use the non-conforming wedge in practice, beat it up as much as you like, then turn to the conforming one for their round. And all of the wedges do well in the sand, especially the 56 degree; they all have a wider flange so you can open them up and get the ball out.”

The verdict? Make room, Mr. Mickelson. Joe Average is coming for you.

www.indigolfclubs.com | Check the price on Amazon!

So what if most Americans still can’t pronounce their name right? With the marketing power of parent company Cleveland-Srixon (which is in turn a subsidiary of Dunlop Sports) and nearly 20 years’ worth of international growth behind them, XXIO 10 (pronounced ZEK-si-oh ten), is making a big push in the United States, spreading the gospel of their “better for lower swing speeds” design and manufacturing philosophy to all corners of the planet’s biggest golf market.

“The company’s been around since the year 2000,” said Chuck Thiry, Vice President of XXIO’s North America headquarters, during a break in the action at the PGA Merchandise Show. “It started in Japan, which is the second biggest market, and since a year after we started the brand, it’s been the number one brand in Japan. Today we build about a third of the irons and woods that are sold in the second largest market. About three years ago they made the decision to bring it to the U.S. We’re now in 500 locations around the country.”

By bringing three-time major champion Ernie Els on as a brand ambassador, XXIO is poised to make inroads from coast to coast.

“It’s a big step for the company,” Thiry said. “He aligns with the brand perfectly, he’s very global, he’s very well respected, he’s got a tempo that lines up with our brand.” Indeed, the Big Easy’s seemingly slow but powerful swing plays well with folks who really do swing slower, far slower than him or anyone in the game’s top tiers. And that’s just fine with Thiry, for whom the phrase “easy does it” translates into high-end sales for well-heeled players.

“From a product or story perspective we’re all about modern swing speeds, 90 to 95 and below. We know that’s not a small niche, it’s a big niche. We believe our product fits almost every woman and it fits all male baby boomers.

“If we have we have one advantage it’s that we’re not like anybody else. So we’re focused on this modern swing-to-be player; most companies start their thinking with the Tour player, the best player, so they have to make their clubs quite a bit different from the head all the way down to the grip. We’re not that concerned with that player.”

The company’s brand new line, introduced in December is called XXIO 10 to reflect another element of its easy-going philosophy. “We introduce product every two years,” Thiry continued. “It’s for both men and women — drivers, fairways, hybrids, irons that match. I would say this fits the bulk of the market, 70 miles an hour to 90 miles an hour.

“Then for the ultra-slow swing speed player, we have XXIO prime, light and soft — 36 gram driver shaft, very soft and flexible with the balance point moved up towards the grip. The heads are still fairly heavy; the way the shaft, the grip and the head interact creates lag in the golf swing and puts the club on a more efficient path — and delivers it faster. Almost every person in this entire building will swing this golf club faster than the one they have now.”

Still, Thiry realizes that XXIO’s niche is still just that — a niche. That’s one reason XXIO won’t take any sales away from the other two legs of Dunlop’s three-legged OEM stool.

“We align them very separately. Cleveland is really a brand that starts first and foremost with short game; they’re known for wedges. So that’s their focus, short game products. Srixon is a high-performance tour brand for better players, and of course XXIO is completely different.”

“Once we put a couple of women are seniors in the product, watch out — the group he plays with see him hitting it higher and 10 yards further and it just starts to go.

“It’s fun — we are at a fun point in our evolution, and fun is a good way to describe the brand. It’s all focused around the word ‘easy.’ Easier distance, easier to hit far, easier to hit straight, easier accuracy, easier golf. It’s a natural that we now have the Big Easy.”

Seems simple enough, doesn’t it?

Learn more at www.xxiousa.com.

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