Article #3 - So You Want To Start A Golf Brand.

Here's what nobody tells you about starting a golf brand: you'll spend a year designing the perfect product, another year learning you were doing it all wrong, and somewhere in between, you'll stroke out wondering why you’re not getting to play more golf.

When we started Folly Golf, we thought we were going to turn the golf ball industry upside down. Spoiler alert: we're not a golf ball company anymore.

Let me back up.

A lot of people think starting a brand is about having a great idea. And sure, that helps. But what really happens is you stumble through a series of increasingly expensive mistakes while pretending you know what you're doing, and if you're lucky, you figure it out before you run out of money.

Here's how it started for us.

We looked at the golf ball market and saw an opportunity. One brand—you know the one—sells a dozen balls for $60+ and positions themselves as serious, trusted, performance-driven. Everyone in the industry talks about launch angles and spin rates and all the technical stuff that makes golf feel like aerospace engineering.

There wasn’t a lot of charisma, and if there was it was exclusively reserved for California-based brands. Meanwhile, we’re living in an absolute golf Mecca, and crickets.

That was all the inspiration we needed. We'd make a tour-quality ball that didn't take itself so seriously. We'd build something rooted in Charleston, inspired by the surf and skate culture of our youth, designed with a casual personality. 

We spent more than a year working on product design, picking a name, filing for trademarks, securing a website URL and social handles. We met a local Charleston artist named Ryan Beck and started developing a relationship with her. We knew we wanted to work with local artists, and we loved Ryan's work, but pulling it all together took time. Ryan picked a killer print for us, but we had to figure out how to make it work on packaging– which, as it turns out, is harder than it sounds.

As we got closer to our launch date 2nd Sunday on King Street in December ‘24, two things happened:

First, we realized we couldn't just show up with golf balls. Four guys, a folding table, and 90 dozen golf balls didn't feel like the answer. So, we slapped our logo on some hats and t-shirts. We designed apparel a month before launch, which isn’t something I recommend replicating, but it made us feel more legit.

Second, Kurt did some light reading. And by light, I mean intense, heavy research into golf ball patents. Turns out, everyone who tries to manufacture golf balls gets sued. if Costco had to bend the knee because Acushnet came after them, who the hell were we to try and take a run at it?

That's one reason we're not a golf ball company.

The other reason? People loved the Folly brand.

Now, granted, the first time we sold our stuff we had a LOT of support from friends and family. I love my mom, but we couldn’t use her enthusiasm as our proof of concept. So, we decided as a group that we needed to go to another 2nd Sunday to test it for real.

In April, we set up again. This time, we told no one. No texting our friends. Just us and whoever happened to walk by. As fate would have it, we outsold ourselves. No friends or family. No holiday gifting. Random people liked what we made, and that's when we knew.

But that only tells part of the story. What happened behind the scenes was another tale entirely.

Our concept was simple: be hyper-local and use the surf and skate culture of our youth to drive our design aesthetic. There was just one problem. Among the decades of relevant experience we had across marketing, branding, business leadership, sales, and golf, none of us knew anything about apparel.

How hard could it be? It's incredibly hard.

The good news? There was nowhere to go but up. The hats we made for King Street cost us almost as much as we sold it for. Those aren’t great economics. So we spent another year teaching ourselves about fashion, supply chain, fit, and fabric. We took meetings with suppliers in China, Vietnam, Portugal, Charleston, Chicago, and Southern California. Every product category came with its own unique challenges and technical specifications. 

Thankfully, all this effort meant we executed flawlessly. (We did not. We screwed up constantly.)

Have you ever screen-printed a shirt with a comically oversized logo? We have. Have you ever embroidered hats with raised embroidery when it was supposed to be flat? Also us.

It wasn't just the design and production. There's been a lot of arguing. Sometimes we don't agree on products. Sometimes we don't agree on design. Sometimes we don't agree on where to get lunch. We've hung up on each other. We've called each other names. We even lost a partner– his family business caught fire in a good way– along the way.

Operating a self-funded small business comes with challenges. Every time we screw up a run of samples, we go back into our own pockets to try again. There's no venture capital cushion. No safety net. Just us.

We've learned that building a brand isn't about having all the answers upfront. It's about being willing to figure it out as you go. It's about caring enough to keep trying even when you mess up. It's about finding the right people—artists like Ryan Beck, suppliers like Turn 90, customers who believe in what you're building—and treating them right.

So if you want to start a golf brand—or any brand, really—here's what I'd tell you:

You're going to make mistakes. Expensive ones. Embarrassing ones. Mistakes that make you want to quit.

You're going to argue with your partners a lot. 

You're going to spend money you don't have on products that don't turn out the way you wanted.

You're going to question whether any of this is worth it.

If you're lucky, somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, you'll figure out what you're actually building. It might not be what you started with. It probably won't be, but if you care enough to keep going, you'll end up with something real.

We thought we were starting a golf ball company. We ended up building a brand that's about so much more than that. It's about personality. It's about making golf feel less serious and more fun. It's about proving that you don't need to be one of the big guys to make something people actually want.

We're nowhere near finished, but we've come so far from where we started.