A Familiar Brand Is Back and Making the Buying Experience Easier

Adams Golf, once a household name for its fairway woods, is now a direct-to-consumer company offering a full line of clubs and accessories.

One can figure out pretty quickly that Adams Golf is going in a bit of a different route as a club manufacturer and seller.

From the "Our Story" page of its website:

Play is a beautiful thing. Play is fun with a goal. In golf, it happens when you take the game seriously enough to try and do your best, but not so serious you ruin your own day. And when it works… you're in the zone. You hit shots that change your whole mood. Beer tastes sweeter. The weather feels even nicer. Your friend's jokes are actually funny. 

This soliloquy goes on a little longer and eventually does include the word "clubs," lest you think you've stumbled onto some Zen golf tips site.

Adams Golf wants to sell you clubs. But the relaunched company is also selling a vibe, which is reflected in the business model.

You undoubtedly remember Adams Golf from the "Tight Lies" fairway woods, Barney Adams's invention from the mid-'90s which sold by the gazillions and filled countless hours of television infomercial time. The woods had a unique head shape and low center of gravity and were plenty easy to hit for a generation of hackers.   

The new Adams promises easy-to-hit clubs too, but there are no infomercials or in-depth analysis of space-age components with unusual words or promises of 13 extra yards. 

Adams Golf offers complete sets of clubs along with a full line of accessories, all sold direct-to-consumer / Courtesy Adams Golf

A page for its Idea driver ($299) mentions a velocity slot and a 4-degree loft sleeve, and that's about it for technical language.

"There's a certain level of technology statements, but it's not overwhelming," says Chandler Carr, the head of product creation for Adams Golf.

Carr is a club guy with decades of experience including years at TaylorMade, Adams's parent company, so he knows the tech. But in this venture, with a direct-to-consumer sales model, the goal is to "easy to buy" just as much as easy to hit.

The aforementioned driver, at $299, is well under the going rate for major manufacturers' big sticks. Fairway metals are $199, hybrids $179 and 4-PW iron sets are $599 for steel and $699 for graphite. Wedges are as low as $99 and putters are $149. All items are available in right and left hands. (Everything but the putters carry the Idea name, as there's market equity in that from previous Adams iterations.)

"The barrier of entry is relatively low," Carr says. "We're passing value onto the consumer.

"But the product technology holds its own against other competitors in the space and will outperform products made by other OEMs."

Adams's research shows there are nearly 11 million young adult golfers, an increase of 13% over last year. There are also 6.2 million new golfers, with women being a driving force in that group.

These players, Carr says, are playing for fun and exercise but they're also aspirational, wanting to get better. They're competitive. But research shows they can find stores overwhelming.

Hence, Adams will sell them entire sets, easily compiled on their site and with a 60-day risk-free policy. That's plenty of rounds to see if one's new bag stacks up.

And if it does, Adams is willing to sell you a bag too. And hats, and other accessories. Even the sleek, redesigned logo is part of the vibe.  

The point, as their story says, is to play. Fun with a goal. And what about that sweeter tasting beer again?