Just how Vice Golf got into the golf club business is certainly a question worth pondering.
It’s easy hot take for the cynic to say Vice simply went to China, slapped its logo on some open-mold models and called it a day. As with most hot takes, it’s lazy and incorrect.
The real story is quite a bit more interesting. It’s a tale of two separate companies, four entrepreneurs, a series of fateful decisions and a two-day wedding bash in Spain.
This, friends, is the story of how two German businesses, Vice Golf and HIO, continental Europe’s largest independent club fitter, found each other.
As they say in Bavaria, Es war Schicksal, liebe Freunde
Vice Golf and HIO: Golf’s not-so-odd couple
Let’s set the stage for you. Vice Golf was started on Dec. 12, 2012, (yes, 12-12-12) in Munich by surfing buddies Ingo Dullman and Rainer Stockl. Vice actually lays claim to being the first-ever direct-to-consumer golf ball company.
Unless you’re from Germany, you can be excused if you’ve never heard of HIO. Also based in Munich, HIO is continental Europe’s largest brand-agnostic club fitter. The company opened for business in 2007 and its founders, Benny Pfister and Marco Berger, did a very smart thing. Almost from Day One, they collected, stored and analyzed data from every single swing their customers made during the fitting process.
This data plays an important role in our story.
“We have all this information about the everyday golfer,” Pfister, who is now Vice Golf’s Chief Growth Officer. “We know his age, his handicap, the golf ball he uses and we have all his launch monitor data captured.”
Pfister and Berger met Dullman and Stockl at a golf show in Munich not long after Vice Golf launched. The four men are only 10 years apart in age and, since they were in the same business in the same city, the inevitable friendship grew. They’d meet a couple of times of year for cookouts and would travel together to the PGA Show in Orlando every January.
Independent paths
As Vice Golf was establishing itself in Europe, HIO was going through some growing pains. It started as a brand-agnostic fitting studio selling all the major brands. It then grew into a distributor and custom-build shop for those brands, servicing more than 90 retailers across Europe. But by 2013, things started to change.
“We started adding clubs from the likes of KZG, Epon, Miura and Vega,” says Pfister. “We also added Tour Edge, which was virtually unknown in Europe.”
That’s when Pfister and Berger learned something very interesting.
“We found a third of our customers wanted only the big brands and another third wanted to buy luxury, high-end stuff,” Pfister explains. “The other third didn’t care about brand. They cared about the fitting and trusted us to make the right recommendation.”
Armed with that information as well as their backgrounds in material science and chemical engineering, Pfister and Berger decided the time was right to develop their own line of clubs.
“Why the hell are we giving away margin?” says Pfister. “And why do products have to go from Asia to the U.S. and then to Germany? Why don’t we develop our own brand and kick out all these minor brands? That’s how Helix came into being.”
Genesis of a merger
According to Merriam-Webster, a “helix” is something in a spiral form, such as an ornamental volute or a coil formed by winding wire around a uniform tube.
According to Pfister, Helix is what ultimately brought HIO and Vice Golf together.
“It was our own brand of clubs developed over seven years in very limited batches to start. We sold it to some customers and kept in touch, asking how they liked the performance, how they were wearing. We made some mistakes in the beginning but we got very good feedback.”
The first Helix models were open models but the line eventually grew to the point where HIO was designing the clubs from scratch, based on its mountain of fitting data.
“We’d fit 4,000 to 5,000 customers a year and we’d log all this data,” Pfister explains. “We’d log all this data on every single shot and then we created equations that could actually make club and shaft recommendations for the golfer.”
By 2016, HIO established itself as the leading fitter in Europe and was looking to take the next step. The problem was that neither Pfister nor Berger knew what that next step should be.
“We thought of franchising throughout Europe but that never felt right. It was too far away from our core business. We liked club development, we had so much data and we knew the average golfer better than anyone on the planet. But no one outside of continental Europe knew who we were.”
The first Vice Golf dalliance
At the same time, Vice Golf was getting its feet wet in the U.S. It had already survived a court tussle with Acushnet and was quickly establishing itself. That’s when the four principals starting kicking around the idea of partnering. Some early draft agreements were drawn up but a Vice Golf investor threw some cold water on everything.
“He said, ‘You guys are crazy. This is too much,’” Pfister remembers. “He said Vice Golf would be working its U.S. plan over the next couple of years and getting into a new product category would be too much of a distraction.”
Sometimes taking a deep breath is the right thing to do.
“It was a really good decision – it would have been too much,” admits Pfister. “HIO actually grew a lot after that. We fathered more knowledge in club development and we gathered more data. Vice grew, too.”
Fast-forward to 2022 and that fateful wedding bash in Spain.
“It was Ingo’s wedding,” says Pfister. “Marco was there and they started talking about it again.”
Vice was now established in the U.S. and had just received an influx of cash from an investor. The timing was right.
“We talked about what it would look like. Should we do a joint venture? In the end, it was all about the data so we decided to merge. Making it work any other way would have been too complicated.”
By mid-2023, the merger was consummated. Less than a year later, the new Vice Golf clubs made their debut.
The Vice Golf-HIO partnership today
HIO and Vice Golf remain separate companies but they operate under one corporate umbrella. As part of the deal, Pfister and Berger have taken positions at Vice corporate.
“I was founder and CEO of HIO,” says Pfister. “But after the merger, we handed operations over to some guys who’d worked there. I let them decide what they want.”
The Helix brand still exists as HIO’s house brand. HIO also sells the new Vice golf clubs as well as big-name brands. Most don’t have a problem with the HIO/Vice connection, save for one of Vice’s old courtroom foes. Titleist was the one company that decided to cut ties with HIO post-merger.
“It’s a lose-lose-lose situation,” says Pfister. “Our customer now can’t compare Titleist clubs to other clubs. HIO is doing a little less business because there are Titleist fans out there and Titleist is selling fewer clubs in Europe.”
We fact-checked that one and found that overall Acushnet brand sales in Europe were down 2.5 percent over the first six months of 2024. Globally, club sales are up slightly but most of that increase comes from the U.S.
It would be easy for the cynic to say HIO is pushing Vice Golf on customers, trying the old bait-and-switch. The numbers don’t bear that out. Pfister says Helix is actually outselling Vice at HIO, even though Vice is priced 10 percent lower than Helix.
“I’d love for them to sell more but they’re not pushing them,” says Pfister. “We could have made HIO a Vice-only fitting studio but we didn’t. We want to be brand-agnostic and give our customers the opportunity to compare.”
This article was written in partnership with Vice
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