How TaylorMade’s Golf Ball Gamble Paid Off

To understand where TaylorMade’s golf ball business is today and how it got here, we need to go back nearly 10 years.

In the early twenty-teens, TaylorMade was very much a metalwoods-first company. The driver was the thing that mattered. Irons were next on the priority list. Everything else came third, which is to say that often it felt like the other categories – wedges, putters, and the golf ball – didn’t matter much at all.

None of that other stuff was critical to the brand identity and when TaylorMade wasn’t the market leader, or even among the leaders in those categories, nobody at TaylorMade seemed to care.

But, as 2015 rolled around, TaylorMade found itself in a bit of post RocketBallz slump. Over the course of little more than a year, the company frenetically released RocketBallz Stage 2, R1, R1 Black, SLDR, JetSpeed and the infinitely forgettable SLDR S.

Long-time CEO Mark King was gone, as was his not-so-long-time successor, Ben Sharpe. David Abeles, TaylorMade’s third CEO in roughly six months, was brought in to steady the ship.

What was left of the year would be spent pounding the reset button, refocusing TaylorMade’s attention on its core product lines and, if nothing else, taking a more generally disciplined approach to the business. That meant hitting the brakes on the accelerated release cadence that had defined the previous years and getting back to what one might describe as a more measured and sensible version of TaylorMade.

Not part of the core business at the time, TaylorMade’s golf ball business wasn’t a priority. The goal for the category was simple: try not to lose money.

A product without a plan

Given where it is today, it’s almost unbelievable that in 2015 TaylorMade was just barely a challenger brand in the golf ball category. It’s not that products were lacking in innovation. TaylorMade had offered five-layer balls for several years running but never managed to achieve any significant success in the market. Penta, Lethal and Tour Preferred had fans but never a following.

In retrospect, no small part of that can be traced to TaylorMade’s lack of commitment to the category.

“We had a really good product,” says Mike Fox, Senior Category Director for Golf Balls at TaylorMade. “What we didn’t have was a strategy and an investment plan we were going to stick to.”

For the golf ball side of the business, it seemed that “not sticking to the plan” was the plan.

In prior years, a fair amount of marketing spend had been penciled in for the golf ball but when sales of metalwoods or irons dipped below expectations, the golf ball money was diverted in an effort to jumpstart sales of the core products.

A fresh start

2016 was TaylorMade’s first year with David Abeles at the helm and, against the backdrop of chaos that defined the previous years, it was a success.  TaylorMade’s first-ever carbon-crowned drivers (the M1 and M2) hit the market along with a new iron lineup. The drivers were especially well received. More importantly, perhaps, they were the only drivers TaylorMade released that year.

By some measure, TaylorMade was back on track.

On the ball side of the business, the company was still operating on a one-year life cycle, which is nearly unheard of in the category. Led by a combination of Tour Preferred and Project A, TaylorMade’s market share hovered between five and six percent.

It was meeting its objective of not losing money on the golf ball but it’s fair to say it still lacked both a cohesive strategy and an investment plan for the category.

That was about to change.

A deep dive on TP5 and visual technology with TaylorMade’s Mike Fox

A new strategy (and a new ball)

In 2016, Titleist’s golf ball market share was above 60 percent. Bridgestone and Callaway were hovering around 11 percent each. Srixon and Nike were both around six. TaylorMade was next on the list.

“We were the sixth largest golf brand in the US,” says Fox. “The joke is that, out of the five brands ahead of us, only four were still in business.”

NIKE had shuttered its golf business the year before but, with a sizeable quantity of heavily discounted balls still on shelves, it was enjoying its best year ever in the category.

TaylorMade was still trying to find its way.

With 2017 came the strategic shift that TaylorMade’s golf ball team had been waiting for. Leadership was fully committed to the golf ball category. That meant doing all the things golf ball brands do: putting real marketing power behind the product, getting both the PGA Tour and PGA professional staff behind the golf ball and fully committing to five-layer technology.

“We had a lot of strategic decisions at that time. This is going to be the first time we were going to launch two five-layer golf balls,” says Fox. “At the time, we had a Tour Preferred and Tour Preferred X. Tour Preferred X was five layers. Tour preferred was four but every one of our Tour players was using a five-layer golf ball. We were, in essence, making a five-layer golf ball for Tour and a four-layer golf ball for the consumer.

“If all of our Tour players are using a five-layer, why are we still making a four-layer?”

TaylorMade’s hook – the thing it would use to draw golfers to the new TP5?

“In 2017, we had arguably the longest golf ball out there,” says Fox. “And we wanted to be known for distance.”

TaylorMade had long believed that, because of its five-layer technology, it had a well-differentiated and ultimately better golf ball. What changed in 2017 wasn’t the technology itself; it’s that TaylorMade was going to make sure golfers finally heard about it.

The first TP5

The 2017 TP5 offered what Fox says is the biggest performance jump in the ball category in company history. The first TP5 offered outstanding short-game spin but because of its five layers (a single core, three mantles and a cover), it offered a significant drop in long-game spin as well.

Fox says the first TP5 reduced long-game spin by more than 500 rpm over the prior model and spun nearly 1,000 rpm less than the leading competitor at the time.

Golfers understand distance. The spin story? That one is harder to tell. Spin separation, or what the industry calls “spin slope”, isn’t top of mind for golfers looking for their next golf ball. It doesn’t resonate like a promise of more distance but that spin separation was not only core to the elevated performance of the product but it was also something TaylorMade believed none of its competitors could offer at the time.

Whether or not you’ve noticed, decreasing long-game spin while simultaneously maintaining or even increasing greenside spin has become a talking point common to nearly every new premium golf ball release. With the first TP5 and its combination of speed, low long-game spin and high greenside spin, there’s an argument to be made that TaylorMade was ahead of the curve.

More importantly, for the first time in a long time, TaylorMade had both a product and plan for the ball category.

It wasn’t long before its commitment was tested.

Rolling the dice on TP5

In early spring of 2017, TaylorMade launched its second generation of M1 and M2 drivers. While it wouldn’t be fair to characterize them as flops, sales failed to meet the expectations set by their predecessors.

In prior years and under different leadership, TaylorMade almost certainly would have diverted marketing efforts and funds from the ball to support the drivers.

Pull the plug. Maybe next year.

This time around, however, instead of sacrificing the golf ball to prop up the driver, TaylorMade stuck to the plan.

The gamble paid off.

Sales of TP5 at DICK’S Sporting Goods alone were five times the original projections and by the time the dust settled, TaylorMade’s market share had grown to nine percent, surpassing Srixon and, yes, NIKE, too. TaylorMade was No. 4 and gaining.

2019, a breakthrough

Two years after the launch of the 2017 model, TaylorMade released new versions of both TP5 and TP5x.

There’s a legitimate argument to be made that the 2019 balls belong in the pantheon of the best-performing golf balls ever made. Both were longer than their predecessors and offered even more greenside spin. Suffice it to say the distance and the spin separation stood out during our 2019 ball test.

More importantly, TaylorMade had cemented its position as a serious golf ball brand and seemingly looked the part of the biggest challenger to Titleist’s dominance in the category.

The success of the 2019 TP5 exceeded TaylorMade’s expectations in nearly every way. The sole exception was its first iteration of the TP5 pix ball.

While pix has evolved to become a staple of the TaylorMade lineup, its first attempt at visual technology (and I use that phrase loosely) wasn’t particularly well conceived.

“When we designed the first-generation pix, it took everything we had just to figure out how to put 12 logos on a ball,” says Fox. “We weren’t trying to make it pretty.”

TaylorMade didn’t have the team to create real visual technology. The original objective was just to make something that looked different and hope that golfers would embrace it.

We didn’t.

The positive to come out of that first pix experiment was that newly signed brand ambassador Rickie Fowler was intrigued by the design. TaylorMade’s ball team felt that if it could add a legitimate performance component to pix it might just have something.

For the second generation of pix, TaylorMade put real R&D horsepower behind it. It got serious about player testing (Fox flew to Florida half a dozen times to work with Fowler on the design), built the infrastructure necessary to leverage the data it was collecting and ultimately brought function to the improved pix form.

The result of those efforts?

Pix went from being the only excess inventory product in the TaylorMade ball catalog to the most back-ordered.

It might be a bit of an oversell to describe the second-generation pix as transformational but it validated TaylorMade’s belief that there was a market for visual technology and set the company on the path that led to MySymbol, Stripe and a growing number of pix products.

Two steps forward

Despite the success of pix, broadly speaking, the 2021 version of TP5 failed to match the performance standard set by the 2019 ball. While we’re unlikely to ever know the full story, the outsider’s view is that, while TaylorMade had a good product and plenty of ideas for improving it, at the time it may have lacked the full capabilities necessary to validate those ideas.

What we can be certain about is that TaylorMade made the mistake of trying to be all things to all golfers.

With 2019’s combination of TP5 and TP5x, TaylorMade had two well-differentiated balls with discernable performance characteristics. With the 2021 TP5 models, instead of embracing and even enhancing the differences between models, TaylorMade pushed the performance spec of the two closer together.

With the 2019 ball, some TaylorMade staffers who appreciated the softer feel and higher spin rates of the TP5 had moved into TP5x because of the added distance. The 2019 TP5x was inarguably one of the longest balls on the market.

Others, however, appreciated the speed of the TP5x but moved into TP5 because of the extra spin around the greens and softer feel.

Instead of leaning into what it had, TaylorMade tried to make everyone happy. It softened the TP5x and added spin. TP5 got a bit firmer and a little faster but it also flew appreciably higher. Greenside spin was still among the very best in class but instead of leveraging the speed TP5 was known for to create distance, TaylorMade sought distance through the aerodynamic properties of its new Tour Flight dimple pattern.

TaylorMade says a good bit of the perceived problems with the 2021 TP5 stem from the fact that a healthy percentage of ball fitting is done indoors where it can be difficult to accurately represent the aerodynamic properties of the golf ball. There’s something to that but one of the takeaways from our 2021 and 2023 ball tests was that both models were appreciably shorter than their 2019 counterparts.

By adding more spin and making the two TP5 models more similar than not, TaylorMade had lost a good bit of what TP5 stood for. Neither ball was among the distance leaders.

The consensus across the industry was that TaylorMade had taken a step backward.

Behind the scenes

Often, the only thing the consumer sees from golf ball brands are TV and internet ads and the boxes on the shelves.

What golfers didn’t see was that, behind the scenes, TaylorMade was making a significant investment to transform and, to no small extent, take total ownership of its golf ball business.

Since putting a stake in the ground and committing to the golf ball, TaylorMade has invested more than $100 million in manufacturing, R&D and human capital.

Owning the process

The TaylorMade golf ball manufacturing story is a bit more complex than most. Its Liberty, S.C., factory was opened in 2013 but the fine print on its U.S. operation is that production is largely limited to applying and painting the cast urethane covers on TP and Tour Response.

Manufacturing of the core and mantle layers for urethane balls is split between Foremost in Taiwan and what was formerly Nassau in Korea. Until recently, those relationships were best described as partnerships. The balls were TaylorMade designs made with some proprietary tooling but the factories themselves were not owned by TaylorMade.

TaylorMade could suggest improvements but it had little power to make them happen.

If you’ve ever tried to convince your landlord to make upgrades to your apartment, you understand the limitations that come with not owning your own place.

“We couldn’t influence them to meet the growth demand wanted,” says Ben Raymond, Senior Engineer, Product Development, Golf Ball at TaylorMade. “We couldn’t influence them to improve their current processes or look at new technologies on the manufacturing side or really go into quality improvements.”

To meet the production demands necessary to scale the ball business, TaylorMade needed more control of its supply chain.

In June 2020, TaylorMade effectively assumed ownership of its production lines at Foremost. In November 2021, it completed its acquisition of the Nassau ball plant in Korea.

While TaylorMade may have been handed the keys, to an extent, the work was just beginning.

As we’ve discussed before, it’s one thing to design a performance golf ball; it’s an entirely different challenge to make millions of them. The factory acquisitions gave TaylorMade greater production capacity and, as the owner, it has significantly more ability to invest in manufacturing a better golf ball.

“We’ve been able to go in and make big improvements and investments. A lot of those molds they have there were really old. They probably hadn’t purchased new ones unless they were forced to increase capacity,” says Ben Raymond.

“[We’re] purchasing all new injection-molding equipment. It really allows us to not only improve the concentricity or the centering, but mold thinner designs, and give us more design capability and then better through-put and overall material savings and quality. We can go in and invest in the equipment and the tooling to help us improve quality moving forward.”

Investments on that scale don’t happen overnight. Improvements are ongoing. Our familiar analogy of changing the tires on a moving car applies to TaylorMade as it works to balance upgrading its capabilities while meeting the increasing production demands of a growing ball business.

Committing to visual technology

Other notable factory investments include the machines necessary to print TaylorMade’s visual technology offerings like pix and Stripe. These are not the type of things you can buy on Amazon. To bring its visual technology to life, TaylorMade had to first invent and then validate and implement the printing machines at the scale necessary to support the demand for pix and Stripe.

Pix remains staple of the TaylorMade lineup. Stripe is now available on both Tour Response and TP5 and you may have noticed a near-continuous stream of limited-edition “Hot Shot” offerings. Recent examples of Hot Shots include Pac-Man, Taco and the Peach-themed Season Opener, complete with a fuzzy peach skin box.

Appropriately themed packing is part of the appeal of the limited-edition products.

I suspect that, by design, TaylorMade has created a collectables market for its limited pix golf balls while simultaneously providing golfers with a reason to try a ball they might not otherwise have.

Quantities are limited with the hope that Hot Shots will sell out in less than a week. On average, the limited-edition balls sell out within four days.

Today, TaylorMade’s assortment of visual offerings accounts for upwards of 30 percent of TP5/TP5x sales although the majority of TaylorMade balls sold are still white.

Investing in R&D

TaylorMade has also made significant investments in R&D. Perhaps most notable of these is the state-of-the-art indoor test range it installed a few years ago. We got our first look at the system in late 2021 and, according to TaylorMade, there was nothing else like it at the time. As with its factories, investment in the test range is ongoing. Most recently, TaylorMade upgraded the camera systems that capture ball flight.

The indoor test range is critical for testing prototypes but it’s also important for validating the new tooling TaylorMade is installing in its factories.

Outdoors, TaylorMade ripped up the range at its showcase Kingdom testing and fitting facility to install a Trackman DART system. Simplified, DART is a series of five Trackman radar launch monitors running the length of the Kingdom range. The system provides the capability to capture the precise position of the golf ball over its full flight with accuracy to within four inches. The Trackman DART system gives TaylorMade the ability to understand and model the full flight of a golf ball and then correlate it with the data it collects on its indoor test range.

The combination of the DART system and the indoor test range, along with investments in growing and improving its golf ball R&D team, has TaylorMade positioned as one of the most technologically advanced ball companies in the game right now.

The 2023 TP5 is the first produced from core to cover at TaylorMade-owned facilities. The three-year gap between TP5 releases may not have been part of the original plan but it gave TaylorMade the time necessary to develop a better ball and implement the factory enhancements to ensure it had the production capacity to not just make it, but make it better.

That’s less a luxury than a necessity when demand for your product has increased six-fold in less than a decade.

TaylorMade’s golf ball business today

That brings us to where we are today. The 2021 ball is in the rearview, replaced by a 2024 offering that builds on the performance standard set by the 2019 model while integrating lessons learned from the 2021 ball. Performance remains the top priority. With that, TaylorMade says the new balls are half a club longer on iron shots with increased spin deltas and softer feel.

The two models have regained their distance and their identity.

Current market share data suggests that roughly 80 percent of the golf ball market is controlled by three brands, with TaylorMade’s share sitting just below 18 percent, and it trails only Titleist in premium urethane ball sales.

Growth of TaylorMade’s ball franchise has outpaced the market ever year since the first TP5 went into production and, in a three-horse race for supremacy in the ball category, the company feels it’s well positioned to challenge for leadership.

“We feel with the product we have, with the momentum we have, with the Tour players we have, with the leadership and visual tech that we have, that we’re as well positioned as anyone has been to be able to do that, and the market is responding to it,” says Mike Fox.

“We’re all-in with no plans on slowing down.”

This article was written in partnership with TaylorMade

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