Sharpen Your Pencil, er, Golf Bag Style With This Head-Turning Collab

Sun Mountain, which last year incorporated baseball glove webbing into a golf bag, is back with a bag that will take you back to your school days.

The Sun Mountain x Victus pencil-themed bag stands out among the sea of stand bags. | Courtesy of Sun Mountain

Welcome to Great Moments in Pencil History ...

Excluding the time when somebody thought to add an eraser on one end, pencils never had a bigger moment than July 2008 at Los Angeles’ Nokia Theater when Will Ferrell accepted an ESPY Award on behalf of Tiger Woods, who was recovering from knee surgery. (Do yourself a favor and watch the video on the Internet.)

Ferrell was hilarious pretending to be Tiger. “You know, people are always asking me, Tiger, how do you do it?” Ferrell said. “My answer is, ‘shut up. I ask the questions around here, I’m Tiger Woods.’” The laughter and jokes continued until Ferrell eventually thanked his fake sponsors, including B.F. Goodrich tires, Bekins Moving and Storage, Little Debbie’s snack cakes and “Ticonderoga pencils No. 2 and No. 3 but not No. 4. Those are ridiculous.” 

Add Sun Mountain to the Pencil Great Moments Top Five with its new StaySharp, the limited-edition Sun Mountain x Victus Pencil Bag. Pencil? Golf bag? Yes, the Sun Mountain StaySharp model looks exactly like a Ticonderoga pencil. It comes in a striking bright yellow with green lettering plus green and red trim at the top. The black base has multiple odd-shaped tan fingers that simulate the appearance of pencil shavings. All that’s missing is a sharp lead point and a red eraser on the other end. The bag is a hot ticket.

It's a pencil ... oh wait, it's a golf bag. | Courtesy of Sun Mountain

“Yeah, it’s kinda going crazy,” said Grant Lourdan, Sun Mountain’s director of marketing and brand strategy. “There’s been a lot of hype, our retailers love it.”

The Sun Mountain Victus bag is a followup to another product by Victus, a sporting goods company that specializes in metal and wood baseball bats. It created a stylized bat looked exactly like a pencil went viral after Bryson Stott of the Philadelphia Phillies used it during the 2023 Little League Classic. Victus also made bats that resembled Crayola crayons, which proved very popular as well.

Victus is owned by Fox Factory Holding Co., the same company that owns Marucci, which collaborated with Sun Mountain a year ago to make golf stand bags with pockets that appear to be woven leather like in baseball gloves. Those custom bags sold out quickly even though the Marucci X model retailed at $1,999.

“The Maruccis sold out in about a week, that was crazy,” Lourdan said. “An unnamed New York Mets player called me last-minute and said, ‘Hey, I’ve gotta give gifts to some guys on my team.’ He ended up buying more than you or I would ever be comfortable with putting on our credit cards. It was a phenomenon.”

So far, the Victus pencil golf bag looks to be one, too.

“It was a really cool idea to partner with Marucci, who’s like us, high-quality stuff, only for baseball,” Lourdan said. “We wanted to take the cross-sports nature of the Marucci bag and make something even louder for an even younger audience. That pencil bat went viral and it’s still viral with youths. That’s why we made a youth version of our bag. It’s also for the guy who wants to impress his son or the youth golfer who needs a full-sized bag.”

The Sun Mountain Victus bag, a full-size stand bag, retails for $350. A smaller junior version sells for $300. If you’re familiar with Sun Mountain products, you know they don’t cut corners. The Victus bag has all the room you want in a stand bag. There are 10 pockets plus a rangefinder pocket. The bag has an eight-inch diameter top with four dividers for clubs. 

“We did partner with Ticonderoga, we had to get licensing rights from them,” Lourdan said. “Our initial design didn’t fit their standards so we had to make a new form so the top and bottom of the bag were completely round. A lot more went into this bag than when we originally had the idea.”

Tour pro Joel Dahmen used the Victus bag in the WM Phoenix Open this year and drew a lot of attention. So did Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Merrill Kelly, who played in the pro-am.

Lourdan joined Sun Mountain a year and a half ago after working for Nike for 10 years. Since he has arrived, Sun Mountain has been on the move.

Where Sun Mountain is heading next

“Sun Mountain is 45 years old, we’re a legacy-heritage brand,” he said. “We’re trying to elevate the brand by talking to younger consumers about the changing dynamics of what a golf bag is. The look and feel and being different is what people want today. It’s almost a fashion trend. People are buying more than one bag a year, on average, and we’re playing in that space.”

There is more coming from Sun Mountain beyond the Victus bag. Lourdan said a Masters-themed bag (without using the word Masters) is about to drop. A new-and-improved version of the popular Club Glider travel bag will be released in June along with a high-tech nylon version of the Match Play, a premium bag made from vinyl. The new model will be called Ballistic. And the company has already launched full-bore into golf apparel, expanding from its traditional niche in rainwear. 

Golf bags remain the company’s specialty, however, and the Victus bag is the latest high-profile example. 

“Authenticity can be delivered in a bright yellow bag (StaySharp) because it’s still the same high quality,” Lourdan said. “We’re still about what we’ve always been about, making the best quality products. We speak to true, authentic golfers and a lot of them are walking golfers.”

And what do most authentic golfers use to keep score on their scorecards?

That’s right. Pencils.