Our Design Process Unveiled

It starts with the golfer, not the product

Every piece of equipment we make begins with a specific player and a specific problem: the mid-handicapper who loses shots to the right under pressure, the walker whose bag is a pound too heavy by the fifteenth. We write that person down before anyone draws anything, and the brief stays on the wall for the whole project. Products designed for everybody tend to suit nobody in particular.

Prototypes early, and deliberately rough

The first version of anything exists within a fortnight, and it is meant to be disappointing. A rough prototype answers the questions that matter — does it balance, can you find it in the bag without looking, does the grip move when your hands are wet — far faster than another week of drawings. We would rather be wrong in week two than in month six.

A prototype that survives its first round unchanged has usually not been tested hard enough.

Testing on real courses, in bad weather

Laboratory numbers are necessary and never sufficient. Everything we make is played by a panel of golfers across a full range of handicaps, in the rain, on wet grips, in the cold, over a season. Most of the small changes that end up in a finished product came out of somebody's complaint at the turn rather than a spreadsheet.

Materials chosen for the tenth year

It is easy to make something feel excellent in a shop and much harder to make it feel the same after two hundred rounds. We choose materials for how they age: how a leather softens, how a zip runs once grit is in it, whether a coating survives being packed wet. Where a component will eventually fail, we make it replaceable rather than pretending it will not.

Nothing ships until somebody says no

Every project has a formal stage where any member of the team can stop it, and that stage is taken seriously enough that things do get stopped. A product we are not certain about is a product we would spend the next three years apologising for, and the reputational arithmetic is not close.

We make fewer things than we could

There is always a case for another colourway, another size, another variant to fill a gap in a catalogue. We turn most of them down. A short line is one we can keep in stock, keep parts for, and keep answering questions about years later — and it is the reason our products change slowly rather than annually.

The design carries on after the sale

We keep making the parts. Grips, spikes, zips, straps and stand mechanisms stay available long after a model has been replaced, and our support team would far rather repair something than sell you the next one. It is the least glamorous part of the process and probably the part we are proudest of.

None of this is a secret and none of it is complicated. It is mostly a matter of refusing to skip the slow parts.