The Pellucid Perspective - August 2017 - 6

GOLF EQUIPMENT
SALES

he pursues a modest business model as his retirement job. Piquing my interest, I put them on my birthday list back in April
and my wife ordered 2 dozen of the balls online for my gift.
I received them promptly and have played them and they're
a great ball for the average golfer who loses 2-3 a round but
doesn't want to hit the "rocks" that are generally sold in stores at
this price point. Even more impressive was that the packing slip
that came along with my order had a hand-written note saying
"Thank You Valerie. Dean Snell." Very different customer experience than the last dozen I bought at Dick's...
Just to demonstrate that this is not just a survey-of-one observation, MyGolfSpy recently did performance testing on the
Vice Golf balls (another DtC brand that's been around a while
and withstood the test of time) and the head-to-head results
again showed relative parity, which brings the average golfer
back to the head-to-head value equation. In fairness to the
leading brand, in the case of Vice, to get meaningful savings it
appears via the website that you need to order 3+ dozen to start
seeing savings and the savings maxes out at 5 dozen so you've
basically got to commit to a "season of Vice" to really get significant savings (<$30/dozen). Back to the Snell example, we paid
$26.99/dozen for a 2 dozen quantity with no shipping costs;
that's real savings at low volume. In the MyGolfSpy testing
article, it's always fun and instructive to read the reader com-

ments and back-and-forth banter. What it suggests to me is
that there's an engaged following which "plays around" to find
the best performance and value suited to their game, not necessarily what the TOUR players play/promote or what retail
stores have on special any given month.
The real question is how big is that following and is it at
terminal velocity or are there others like me out there who are
looking for performance and value in their equipment based
on their game and seasonal investment level. We don't know
the answer to that yet but we've seen in other industries that
disruption can happen suddenly and at significant scale by
word-of-mouth and unexpected events like the K-Sig experience and resulting PR. This happened when Target decided to
carry Harry's razors chainwide to send a shot across the bow to
Gillette as well as offer its customers a different value point in
store. On the other hand, Snell and Vice have been out there
for a number of years and neither has yet captured lightning in a
bottle. It will be fun and interesting to watch from the sidelines.
The only thing I can be fairly certain of is that the DtC model
in the Consumables segment of golf is only likely to grow and
there will be winners and losers from that. If it expands sales of
golf balls or gets more people to play or play more often through
a better value point and counters the familiar contention that
"golf costs too much," that can't be a bad thing, can it?
n

Sometimes the best
moments of the job...

...are the ones
you don't get to see.

Your course is more than just a superb collection of fairways, greens and bunkers. To golfers, it's a sacred
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6 The Pellucid PersPecTive

August 2017

https://www.mygolfspy.com/vice-pro-plus-vs-titleist-pro-v1x/ https://www.backedbybayer.com/golf-course-management https://www.twitter.com/BayerGolf?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor http://www.backedbybayer.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Pellucid Perspective - August 2017