Batavia golf club maker thinks outside the tee box

With the possible exception of NASCAR, no sport puts as much effort into branding its athletes as professional golf.

From the bags that carry the clubs to the hats and shirts worn by the players, the names of golf equipment manufacturers and distributors are on full display. Professional golfers may be known for their swings, stances and putting styles, but golf club companies are known for who uses their equipment.

Competition is fierce. Contracts are signed and golfers nearing the end of a contract are wooed by competitors to wear a certain shoe, line of clubs or glove.

David Glod, president and founder of Batavia's Tour Edge Golf, knows all the challenges of getting golfers to use his equipment. But Tour Edge Golf has one hurdle the big companies don't: They don't compensate golfers to use their clubs.

Despite that drawback, Tour Edge clubs has made a name for itself among the pro ranks.

"A lot of them use our products," Glod said.

"It is nice to have that benefit without that marketing outlay, so we can spend more of our money on developing our product."

That's a sign of a quality product, and offering a quality product is one of the goals of Glod's company.

Getting started

Glod was a teenage boy living in Glen Ellyn with a passion for the game of golf. He was a solid player with a playing career ahead of him, but his greater interest was in working with the equipment.

"I grew up repairing clubs as a high schooler," Glod said. "I had a business out of my father's house. I played high school golf (at Glenbard South) and I played college golf (at College of DuPage and Florida Southern University) and when I got out of college I took a job at Village Links in Glen Ellyn as an assistant pro. I became the club pro and started teaching on the side, but I ran out of gas working on a golf course. It wasn't my cup of tea."

That's when Glod decided to start designing, creating and providing clubs to pros and recreational golfers alike, with a single-minded focus on one aspect of his product that would make it stand out among all of the other clubs available at the time.

"There was an opening in price point," Glod said. "At that time (1986), there was McGregor, Wilson, Hogan, and that was about it. A little bit of Ping maybe. But everything was $1,000 iron sets, so we came out with a $300 - $400 iron sets and found our niche."

Glod also provided two other promises that became Tour Edge selling points. He offered a lifetime warranty on the clubs, and he offered golfers a 30-day trial period to see if the clubs were appreciated and fit properly.

Glod is a big believer in golf club fit, and says that going forward, golfers will pay even more attention to that aspect than they do today.

'A lot of variability'

In his first year of business, Tour Edge Golf produced revenues of approximately $100,000. Today it competes with a dozen bigger and public companies for the attention of pro golfers in a business estimated at $9 billion annually.

"There is quite a lot of variability in clubs today, with all of the science we have," Glod said. "The casting methods, the shafts themselves, there are variations. But the whole thing we are keying on is trying to fit the golfer better. There is a wide range of swing types and swing speeds, and fine tuning clubs for each golfer is where the future is now."

Glod could not have seen that future when he first started Tour Edge. They initially sold drivers and woods, but in 1999, Tour Edge was among the first to offer a hybrid iron-wood that has become standard equipment for most golfers. Creating the Lift-Off Iron-Wood, a club designed to replace long irons, Tour Edge made a name for itself at the 1999 PGA Merchandise Show. The club took off so well that the company trademarked the category of iron-wood, which almost every golf manufacturer now provides. It was named ING's Breakthrough Product of the Year.

In 2001, Glod and his company earned the Industry Honors Business Achievement Award from the International Network of Golf, as well as Golfweek's Top 40 Industry Leaders honors.

Today, Tour Edge offers two brands, the Exotics and Tour Edge clubs. Exotics are for pros and serious golfers, and are clubs that Tour Edge does its experimentation, bringing the shafts and heads from manufacturing plants in China and hand-assembling them one at a time in Batavia.

Glod prides himself on the company's continuing efforts to serve both the professional and the recreational player quality clubs.

Relationships matter

The money shots come on the pro tour, and Tour Edge competes - at no compensation to the golfer - with companies like Callaway, Nike, Ping, Titleist and TaylorMade but it doesn't seem to matter.

Brent Snedeker won the Tour championship in 2012 and claimed the FedEx Cup that year using a Tour Edge Exotics CB4 3-wood. At one time or another, Tour Edge has been in the playing bags of golfers like Luke Donald, Zach Johnson and Kevin Streelman as well as storied veterans Tom Watson, David Duval and Nick Faldo, who have decades-long relationships with other club manufacturers.

Glod knows the importance of developing relationships with golfers, and knows that his company must be ever-diligent about finding golfers who are willing to use his clubs on the tour.

"Relationships are so important, and that is one of our strengths," Glod said. "We don't have the capital that public companies have like Titlist, TaylorMade or Calloway to market or advertise.

"The contracts players have with those companies are all different, but for the most part they are multiyear contracts," he said. "Those contracts are for between 11 and 14 clubs, and they are quite lucrative. But we find golfers that have room in their bags for our clubs."

Some golfers have ironclad contracts that do not allow for that sort of freedom. Glod points to Phil Mickelson, who "can't even look at another club but Calloway" because of his contract.

But Snedeker, for instance, has a contract with Bridgestone "but all he has to do is play the driver and the irons and they let him do whatever he wants beyond that, which gives players a little more variability and choice."

It is possible for a golfer to have a contract with a large company to use their driver and long irons but can use a 3-wood or 5-wood or short irons and putter from other companies. It is those golfers who find themselves using Tour Edge clubs.

Because of the contracts pro golfers have with the larger public companies, they cannot advertise or announce their use of Tour Edge equipment.

Endless innovation

Just as with smartphones, every new innovation in golf clubs is met with the question, "What else can be done to improve these products?" According to Glod, there are an endless number of innovations to come.

"With the strength of the science we have now, anything is possible," he said. "With launch monitors, we now know how launch affects the ball. With the changes in the ball, the clubs need to change as well.

"It is a complex set of answers,'' he said. "Most of the shafts we grew up with were over 100 grams (in weight) but kids today grow up with shaft that are 50-60 grams. It is just like lightweight bikes or tennis rackets, the evolution of the golf shaft is ongoing, and that is just one side of the equation."