Golf is a broken record.
Every year, we hear from golfers that OEM prices are getting out of control and that this year’s drivers aren’t any better than last year’s.
Every year, however, TaylorMade, Callaway, PING and Titleist lead in iron and driver sales by a fairly significant margin. Despite our moaning and wailing and gnashing of teeth, we as consumers do equate price with quality and performance. Part of that is human nature and part of that is what we call brandwashing.
Like it or not, friends, marketing works. That’s why the big OEMs spend as much as they do on it.
However, we’re not here to talk about that today.
We are, instead, here to talk about a company that’s trying to thread a pretty fine needle. That company is Tour Edge Golf, and it’s trying to carve out a growth niche somewhere between the Big Four, the remainder of the mainstream OEMs and the emerging direct-to-consumer offerings.
While the eye of that needle is fine, Tour Edge firmly believes there’s plenty of daylight on the other side of it. What’s more fascinating is that Tour Edge is planning on running to that daylight by spending less on marketing, not more.
As Pepper Brooks famously said, “It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for them.”
Tour Edge Golf at 40: Big changes on the way
Starting this fall, the Tour Edge you thought you knew won’t be the Tour Edge you know.
Tour Edge Golf has more in common with PING than you might realize. The family-owned and -operated business was founded by David Glod in 1986. Glod started his own club repair business as a teenager in Chicago. That one-man show would eventually morph into the original Tour Edge. Glod would build custom iron sets from components by day and refinish persimmon woods by night, all in the basement of his townhouse.
“We had this vent in the upstairs master bedroom to take the polyurethane fumes out of the house,” Glod tells MyGolfSpy. “I did 50 refinishes every two weeks. With all those fumes, how am I alive today?”
Glod had played college golf and spent time as a club pro. Along the way, he picked up a knack for club design. His first original creation was a wide-soled iron set called Fibersonic. His first big hit, however, was the Bazooka driver, released in the wake of Big Bertha mania.
“We built the company from nothing, brick by brick. We did about $100,000 the first year, $200,000 the second. By the mid-’90s, we were a national company doing about $3 million.”
The Exotics line followed in 2005. Tour Edge figured out how to weld a titanium face into a stainless-steel body (called “Combo Brazing), which produced a metalwood so good that Brendt Snedeker, Matt Kuchar and then world No. 1 Luke Donald bagged it without compensation.
“We were endorsed by the unendorsed,” says Tour Edge Marketing VP John Claffey.
The 2018 “value” shift
Through 2017, the Exotics line was priced, well, exotically. They were the first fairways to crack the $300 and $400 price barrier. However, in 2018, Tour Edge repositioned Exotics as a high-performing yet value-priced lineup. At a time when mainstream OEM drivers were approaching $500, the new Exotics EXS came in at $299.
“We engineer just like everyone else, with algorithms, AI, everything,” explains Glod. “We just don’t have the Tour expense per head as the other guys and we don’t have the advertising spend.”
After 40 years, Tour Edge has found its niche as a tech-heavy, high-value OEM. In a year where OEMs are giddy over flat sales, Tour Edge says Exotics 725 metalwoods are double last year’s numbers while 725 iron sales have tripled.
That success, combined with a fresh and energetic new management team, means the time is right for a similarly fresh and energetic new approach. So Tour Edge is embarking on a total corporate rebrand and image makeover.
“We have to get younger and more approachable,” says Alessandra Ladd, Tour Edge VP of Brand and Strategic Partnerships. “A ton of new golfers have come into the space who may not know who Tour Edge is while others who’ve been around the game may have a preconceived notion of who Tour Edge is.”
Ladd is a former Wilson Golf sales and marketing executive who came to Tour Edge last September. She joins former Wilson Golf chief Tim Clarke whom Glod hired as Tour Edge’s president last summer.
“David is the owner and he runs a tight ship,” says Clarke. “I’ve always been impressed with the Exotics line. We’d test them at Wilson and say, ‘How do they do it?’ Then at night, I’d say to myself, ‘Why can’t we do it?’”
Who is the new Tour Edge?
“We have this new vigor going on in the company,” explains Glod. “It’s a newness and freshness from the ground up.”
Clarke, Ladd and Claffey (who came to Tour Edge Golf after stints at Volvik and Sonartec) are part of that new energy along with Tour Operations and Fitting Director Duffy Callahan (another ex-Wilson guy).
“David has let me come in and help with developing our culture,” says Clarke. “Getting Alessandra and Duffy to make the jump, and Claff with his years in the business, this house is in such good order that I really believe it’s going to explode.”
“This is different from anyplace else I’ve worked,” explains Claffey. “I’m always very loyal to my brand but I’ve never had a brand be loyal back to me like this. The way this place is run, the way we care about each other, it’s just different.”
Callahan spent 12 years working with Clarke and Ladd at Wilson. As a Chicago native, he’s always known Tour Edge.
“When this opportunity came up, I told David no matter what I do, I want to win. Winning is important to me. David was the same way. I could see he just wanted to win, too.”
“I’ve always been a hard worker and, for some reason, I’ve always been on an underdog team,” says Ladd. “From high school basketball to college golf to teaching at low-income schools for Teach America, I love building from the ground up.
“The opportunity is here and we’re adding a consumer-centric vibe to it all. Our trade partners love doing business with us. The next step is to get customers to love our brand, too.”
Crafting a new message
Corporate branding is essential. And it’s very easy to do poorly. Unless you look at yourself honestly and your customers respectfully, branding often results in nothing more than a new logo.
Considering its small size and somewhat schizophrenic history, what Tour Edge learned in its research wasn’t surprising. Many golfers knew Tour Edge as a “senior golfer” solution, due to its heavy PGA Tour Champions presence. Others saw it as a packaged set/beginner brand. Some knew the brand for high performance and great value (“I can’t get it out of my bag” was a frequent comment) but the largest group didn’t know much at all about Tour Edge.
“That’s our biggest opportunity: no preconceived notions,” says Ladd.
That probably doesn’t compute to anyone reading this article. We avid golfer-types tend to think everyone knows about every brand because that’s our experience. Spend time listening to the typical golfer you meet on the course and you’ll learn that’s not the case. Once you get past the top four, maybe five, brands, everything else is a crapshoot.
“The biggest message I got from my research is that we’re an untested equipment brand,” says Ladd.
“We have a huge opportunity with irons,” explains Clarke. “We already sell more drivers than Wilson sells but our irons right now are as good as anything. We just have to talk more comprehensively about our brand and our brand experience.”
That’s where you’ll see the biggest changes in Tour Edge. It has dropped traditional advertising in favor of less expensive and more quantifiable social media marketing. What’s more, the overall vibe of that messaging, along with the look and feel of Tour Edge golf equipment, is being modernized with a clean, classy look and a new logo.
Less emphasis on price, more on experience
Since 2018, Tour Edge has hammered the message that its products offer more technology per dollar than anyone else in the industry.
“Tim and Alessandra, when they came on board, said, ‘You guys are shouting this value thing,’” says Claffey. “The price tag already does that job on the showroom floor. You don’t need to shout it to attract people.”
“We need to draw golfers in on why they should play our stuff,” explains Ladd. “We need to tie in more of an emotional value to draw people in and help them connect to the brand.”
To do that, Tour Edge will leverage what it considers its authenticity as a golf-only brand.
“David has been making great equipment for a long time,” says Ladd. “That’s something we can hang our hat on. We just need to make using our products more desirable.”
You’ll see more online content connecting Tour Edge to your experiences on and off the golf course. It’s an approach you expect from high-priced brands such as Titleist, not from a value brand.
“I don’t think any brand is doing this particularly well right now,” says Ladd. “People like to see that connection to those beautiful moments on the golf course but in a way that relates to them. It’s beating balls in your garage, a weekend round at your local muni, it’s grabbing a bite at the turn, smoking a cigar or waiting for the next group to move on.
“That’s all part of golf and we want to celebrate it.”
Buying the story first
As much as we like to consider ourselves smart, savvy and cynical consumers unaffected by warm and fuzzy branding and marketing, we really aren’t. We buy the story just as much as we buy the product.
“We’re trying to become a storytelling brand,” Ladd says. “The top three or four companies can spend promo dollars in every possible way but that drives retail prices up. You’ll see us doing it digitally.”
It’s one thing to tell the story but if the product doesn’t hold up, no amount of storytelling is going to cover it up. That’s where Tour Edge’s Champions Tour validation comes into play, along with its long relationship with its headline Tour pro, Bernhard Langer.
“We’ve had 200 different players put us in the bag in some form or another over the last seven years,” says Claffey. “We haven’t paid a single player, not even our staff players, to play our driver, yet 53 have put it into play in the last two years alone.”
Tour Edge does sponsor Langer, Scott McCarron and Alex Cejka.
“We pay them to have our name out there on staff bags and to use them in advertisements and video content,” Claffey explains. “The other 190-plus, however, are not paid.”
So far, the formula appears to be working. As mentioned, new 725 driver and metalwood sales so far are double last year’s sales while 725 irons sales are triple. It’s all been done with zero TV advertising.
What you’ll see from Tour Edge Golf going forward
We did get a sneak peek at the new Tour Edge logo and its new products. All we can say is they won’t look like any Tour Edge products you’ve seen recently, if ever. It’s a clean, modern design that achieves Ladd’s vision.
You’ll also notice less emphasis on price and more on product performance and experience. While that’s a throwback to the early days of Exotics, it’s also a page from the Titleist or Callaway playbook. The idea is that once you know the company’s story and experience the performance, the price will speak for itself.
The biggest difference is you won’t see any of it on Golf Channel.
The new look and overall brand refresh will start rolling out this summer on the company’s social channels. The official rebrand announcement will be on Nov. 1 when Tour Edge launches its 2026 product lines. We’ve seen the irons, driver and a couple of other items we can’t discuss yet, but they’ll be worth the wait.
Additionally, Glod is working on some limited-edition 40th anniversary products for next year.
Tour Edge isn’t just hoping for growth; it’s ready for it. The modern Batavia, Ill., headquarters and production facility opened in 2005 and current capacity can be easily expanded. The unique assembly line process was developed with the same consulting firm that created Toyota’s assembly line. The company has three lines, each of which can crank out about 1,000 clubs per shift.
What does any of this mean to you?
Complaining about price is a blood sport for golfers in 2025. However, while in the throes of those price tantrums, we fail to recognize that we have more high-performing, lower-priced options than ever before.
The Big Four market performance over price for one simple reason: for that price, you expect performance. That message also subtly conditions you to believe you need to pay that price to get performance. Anything less is a risky compromise.
Tour Edge is taking a bit of a gamble here. It’s playing the same game by focusing on performance and experience but with an ace up its sleeve. If the performance and brand vibe work for you, the $379 isn’t a risk. The question is: Can it break the conditioning, or brandwashing, that makes people believe that price equals performance?
Either way, it’s a pretty bold move. None of it, however, works without equipment that’s aesthetically pleasing and high-performing.
“We have so much more validity out there right now,” says Glod. “We did it through the product and the engineering. And we’ve hired the right people.”
MyGolfSpy testing bears that out. Tour Edge has had category winners and consistently strong performers along with the occasional clunker. Then again, the same can be said of any of the Big Four.
Every golf company has a marketing machine and I don’t care who you are, that machine has influenced you whether you realize it or not. However, one of life’s fundamental truths remains.
We all get to vote with our dollars for the kind of world we want to live in.
Tour Edge’s bold marketing makeover is all about earning a few more votes.
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