Why Less Means More for Mnml Golf
Sam Goulden, renaissance dude, has about 20 used golf bags propped up against a wall in his office and he couldn’t be happier. Goulden is not necessarily in the used bag business but he’s hoping they come flooding into his studio in Redondo Beach, Calif., and if they do, it means business is good and he’s giving back, at the same time.
Goulden is the founder and CEO of Mnml Golf and has developed a golf bag that he believes not only eliminates unnecessary pockets, zippers and dividers on bags but adds features that will make modern golfers both surprised and wondering why someone hadn’t thought of this before now.
And one of those ideas is the Trade It Forward program. The purchase of a Mnml bag comes with a $50 discount if you send back a gently used bag in the same box in which your new bag came, with a prepaid shipping label provided by Mnml. Since the program began, Goulden says, about 80 bags have gone to deserving junior golfers in the Los Angeles area in just six weeks. One customer brought Goulden a new set of irons he won in a raffle and didn’t want.
Mnml is an internet abbreviation for "minimal" and the practically brand-new company officially opened for business in January 2020. The 42-year-old Goulden’s path to this point has been anything but a straight line. He has evolved from skateboarder to high school walk-on to range-rat junior college dropout to college scholarship to Monday qualifier chaser to video star to online teaching pro to part-time surf bum to author to app start-up to business owner.
Sounds a lot like Johnny Cash’s wandering song, "I’ve Been Everywhere." Goulden grew up in Washington, Mo., a town of about 10,000 at the time, 55 miles west of St. Louis. He was a skater kid and only thought about golf because Washington High School was going to start a golf team, funded by the grandfather of one of his best friends.
Goulden talked his mother out of a summer’s worth of allowance, bought some clubs and in two weeks on the driving range, convinced the golf coach he could make the team. His best score in the nine-hole matches was 42 on a par-32 course. But he was smitten.
He convinced Mike Fromuth, the pro at Wolf Hollow Golf Club when it opened in 1999, to hire him and his job was to pick range balls and take care of the carts. In the bargain, Goulden camped out on the range and hit balls in every spare moment. “I became completely possessed by the act of hitting a golf ball,” he says.
When it came time for college, "I thought I would be a teacher," Goulden says. Instead, he dropped out of junior college because he was obsessed with golf and became a scratch player in a year. His old high school teammate convinced Goulden to walk on at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Mo., and he played there for a year and a half.
From 2009-15, Goulden chased professional golf with very little success, while at the same time teaching golf online. He posted his first YouTube instructional video in 2009 and found that’s was where his income would come from, or at least finance his expenses on the mini-tours.
He wrote the first of three e-books in 2013, called “The Square to Square Swing,” not realizing that he’d taken the name of an instruction book from 1970 that is widely blamed for ruining a large number of amateur golfers’ swings.
In 2014, Goulden put together "Team Tour Quest," a video diary of three and sometimes four young guys carpooling to pre-qualifiers to get into Monday qualifiers on the PGA Tour and Web.com Tour, sharing cheap hotel rooms and inexpensive meals. The videos appeared on YouTube and all of Goulden’s social media platforms. "Four adults living like college students," he said.
Goulden met Eddy Lui, a San Francisco businessman who had developed technology startups and wanted to create a golf app. Lui hired Goulden as the first employee of 18Birdies in 2014 but Goulden moved on after a year.
He met and taught golf to Charles Pasarell Jr., whose father and uncle Stanley — legendary pro tennis players — owned Royal Isabela, a resort on the northwest coast of Puerto Rico. Goulden lived there for two years and escaped from Hurricane Maria in 2017, fully intending to return when the power came back on.
But he had reached a crossroads. "I thought, 'You can go back and be a surf bum in Puerto Rico again or you can do something you’re passionate about.'"
Goulden had drawn a sketch on a napkin of what he thought was a practical golf bag. "What do people really need in a bag?" he asked. "They don’t need to carry as much junk, so let's strip it down but add some things that makes sense for the kind of golf people play. They listen to music, so we put in a Bluetooth speaker, and you need to find a way to charge the phone and the speaker. I thought a solar power bank would work so you can charge your phone and your speaker in one package."
The MV2 bag is the second iteration, which came after two prototypes with 30 changes to each. In addition to the solar power bank, the bag has a pocket for a smartphone that places the phone at the right level that enables players to record their swings.
Pockets are secured with magnets instead of zippers and one pocket can hold six 12-ounce cans with ice. The bag weighs five pounds with nothing in it and the microsuede fabric is easy to clean.
"I’m focused on making the best high-utility golf bag for the modern golfer," Goulden says "I don’t think you need a Sunday bag, a cart bag and another bag. One bag should do everything."