Oh, and along the way their equipment is used to win 3 majors and cop 2 nd place in a fourth. Did I mention their tour staff has 3 wins worldwide this year? Not bad for a 7-year old company, wouldn’t you say? I bet you’d think reaching that level of accomplishment in only 7 years is borderline amazing. You’d probably think these guys must be making pretty good stuff, and you might even say, “bully for the little guy showing those big OEM’s a thing or two!” What if this company follows 2-year product release cycles, doesn’t come out with a new driver every six months, doesn’t promise you 17 more yards every year and doesn’t go over-the-top-crazy signing Tour staff to big money deals. They preach fiscal responsibility and provide you, the consumer, with gear priced well below TaylorMade, Callaway and the gang? And what if I told you this little company had some of the better performing drivers and fairway woods in the MGS Most Wanted reviews in both and?
And one of the MGS has ever reviewed? Bet you didn’t see that one coming. Re-Booting Wilson Golf Okay, so maybe that “starting in 2007” line may have thrown you, but there’s a very compelling argument to be made that 2007 was the year that separates the Tale of Two Wilson’s. The first Tale serves as a Harvard Business School-level case study on how to drive a legendary global brand into the ground and damn near kill it.
The second Tale can’t really be called a rebirth or resurrection (not yet, anyway), but it can be called a re-boot. Wilson 2.0, if you will. Today we’ll look at just what did happen to Wilson and how, through a series of ownership changes, an evolving golf landscape and, as today’s Wilson leadership freely admits, poor management and really, really bad decisions steered this once-proud market leader to the edge of doom and worse: irrelevance. A bit later we’ll discuss what’s happened since the 2007 re-boot, how Wilson is trying to get back in the game and assess whether they’re succeeding. And lastly we’ll look at Wilson’s equipment, their philosophy and what their brand is trying to be.
So, just what the hell did happen to Wilson Golf? To understand, we need some background.
We all know the old Wilson: iconic forged irons; Snead, Palmer, Stewart, Caspar, Irwin, et al; more majors than any other brand. And we all know that Wilson seemingly fell of a cliff somewhere along the way and slipped into virtual irrelevancy. “With any 100-year old brand there are ebbs and flows that happen,” said Wilson Golf General Manager Tim Clarke, in an interview earlier this month in Arizona.
Now there’s an understatement. So when did the ebbing start for? The answer can be found in 5 watershed years: 1970, 1985, 1993, 1997 and 2006, and it starts with the taste of a new generation The Boxed Sets of the Pepsi Era PepsiCo bought Wilson in 1970, and its stewardship of the brand ran through 1985. During that time the seeds were planted that would ultimately send Wilson Golf tumbling from the top of the mountain to beneath the bottom of the heap. Back then Wilson was the name in golf: world-class irons and the tour’s best players on staff.
But in the 70s PepsiCo management started taking over various Wilson business units, including golf. “Everybody wants to make their mark,” said Clarke. “A new person comes in and he’s gonna tell you how it’s gonna be done, because the way you’ve been doing it is wrong.” The new Pepsi people started doing what Pepsi did best – package stuff and sell large quantities of it – hence the birth of Wilson’s “boxed sets.” Boxed sets became high dollar volume, low margin, low service SKUs sold through department stores. Wilson sold a ton of them over the decades, creating cash flow.
But the damage to the brand, the notion that Wilson was a “department store brand,” had begun. In 1985, PepsiCo sold Wilson to a highly leveraged private equity group, and 4 years later the equity group sold out to Amer Sports, a Finnish holding company (which at the time also owned MacGregor, buying controlling interest from Jack Nicklaus in 1986). Amer still owns Wilson today. “During that period of time there was a clump of three ownership changes in a period of 4 years,” said Clarke. “It affects your business and it affects what you stand for.” But as I learned during my visit with Wilson management, bad business decisions didn’t end with new ownership. “If you think back, in 1993 Wilson was on top of the mountain in irons,” said Clarke.
“We had multiple tour players but we were losing market share even though we made great stuff. We were the forging darling back then. We couldn’t make any money, but we were number one!
The perception was we were great. The reality was fiscally we were a disaster.” Wilson’s long run at the top was about to take a sharp right turn. They were still selling tons of irons, but Callaway was making Big Bertha-sized waves. The King Cobra oversized irons came out, and TaylorMade was prepping its Bubble Burner shaft. The new girls in town were starting to turn heads. And Wilson Golf was swimming in red ink. Compounding Mistakes So what do businesses do when they start losing both money and market share?
They tend to make shortsighted decisions that haunt them for decades. Wilson started trimming its Tour staff and, much to the chagrin of Pro Shops (who still sold most of the balls and equipment back then. Ask your Dad), jumped in bed with Wal-Mart. At that time Wilson’s Ultra was one of the best selling balls in golf, giving Titleist a run for its money. In a quest to meet sales goals and secure end-of-year cash bonuses, management cut a huge deal with Wal-Mart for the Ultra.
Wal-Mart could sell the balls for roughly a dollar more than what the Pros could buy them for. Reaction from the pros was about what you’d expect. Now let’s fast forward to 1997. Wilson’s sales are still strong at a round $350 million but, according to Clarke, the division is still losing money by the barrel. MacGregor, doing even worse, is dumped by Amer Sports. In ’97 Tiger makes history at the Masters with a hot new Cobra driver and later bags Titleist irons. Adidas buys Taylormade, and TM staffer Ernie Els wins the US Open.
Ping and Callaway are still flexing, and what does Wilson come out with? “Fat Shaft worked – there’s no doubt about it,” said Clarke. “The consumer didn’t vote for it as well as we hoped because it was polarizing. Some people would just set that thing down and they were used to something tapered and were like, ‘uh-uh, I’m not gonna play it.’.
“Even though I could put you on a Trackman and I can show you data to prove you’re an idiot for not playing it, people just wouldn’t listen. When I took over we did move out of Fat Shaft, because customization and fitting were becoming so important. You couldn’t really customize and fit Fat Shaft.” – Tim Clarke, General Manager – Wilson Golf It was also around this time Wilson Golf started riding the General Manager merry-go-round: 6 new GM’s in a period of 10 years, with each trying to fix what the guy before him messed up. “That’s a lot of change,” said Clarke. “I saw us go here, I saw us go hereI’ve seen a lot of it.
We just kept changing directionwhether it’s ownership changes or general manager changes, it affects your business and it affects what you stand for. “Golf consumers are very educated. The elite followers are exceptionally knowledgeable, so you gotta stand for something.” By the early 2000’s Wilson started standing for Game Improvement irons, with premium irons taking a back seat. Wilson continued to cut back on Tour staff and TV advertising, market share kept dwindling and the losses kept mounting. The cash flow from the low-margin, high-volume boxed-set sales, one would think, was critical. Revolving-door management teams kept making the types of decisions that downward-spiraling businesses tend to make – bad ones. The sales force was downsized, the marketing budget was slashed and R&D was at a standstill.
“And when you do that,” said Clarke, “sales disappear and things go south.” Hitting Rock Bottom 2006 may have been rock bottom for Wilson Golf. From ’97 to ’06 sales nosedived nearly 55%, to roughly $153 million and the losses kept mounting, to the tune of around $15 million per year. Was there a concern that Wilson would go the way of MacGregor?
“Oh yeah, for sure,” said Clarke. “There are lots of sleepless nights when you’re in a business unit that’s losing millions of dollars. When I first got the position (Clarke was named Wilson Golf GM in late ’06) people would say ‘you need Amer Sport to investment-spend in you!’ And I’m like, they are! They’re covering our $15 million in losses. What do you want me to do, tell them to give me another 15?” Wilson didn’t fall down this rabbit hole overnight. The downward tumble started gradually, but soon turned into a 22-year long landslide and rumors started swirling that Wilson Golf could be sold off.
By Clarke’s estimate, Wilson’s market share in irons bottomed out at roughly 0.6% by 2007. Read that again. The brand that had, for decades, been the standard in golf and had won more majors than any other brand, was now only selling roughly 1 out of every 200 golf clubs sold in the U.S. At that time, golf industry analyst Casey Alexander wrote, “The public perception is that Wilson no longer makes premium golf clubs. If that perception goes on for two or three season, it will be a daunting task for management to turn the Wilson ship around.” Is Wilson up to that daunting task, or is the brand too far gone? “If you think about how long it took us to get the perception of ‘poor’,’’ said Clarke, “it’s going to take us probably just as long, if not longer, to get us back into the world class. We didn’t get there overnight, we’re not getting out overnight.” Stable Management Clarke has been the head man at Wilson Golf for over 7 years now – a relative eternity compared to the “Whack-A-Mole” management that preceded him.
Since 2006 Wilson Golf’s overall sales have dropped further, down 20% from $153 million to what Clarke estimates to be in the mid-$120 million range this year. The difference is the color of the ink at the bottom of the ledger. Black has replaced red. “To deliver a profit this year in a golf market where we see TaylorMade down 40%? We’re up in the US. We’ve had double-digit growth the last three years in the US that’s been driven by our pro line equipment.
And this year we’re up again, and we’re probably one of the few companies that can say that.” – Tim Clarke, General Manager – Wilson Golf Double-digit growth may sound impressive, but when you’re starting from a 0.6% market share that kind of growth still represents baby steps. In the coming days we’ll look how Wilson is trying to keep the baby stepping while changing its perception; how Wilson spends its money and how important a little “luck of the Irish” was in re-booting Wilson 2.0. In Case You Missed It. I’ve been playing various models of Wilson’s golf clubs for 30 years. Started with my dads fg-17 irons. Tried some hogan edge irons, didn’t like em, found a set of MacGregor jnp irons. Now I’m back to Wilson as my go to clubs.
This time around I’m playing vintage gooseneck fg-53’s. I’m a fan of vintage golf equipment and nothing is better than catching a blade or a persimmon wood in the sweet spot. To me, golf is more enjoyable and rewarding with the vintage equipment. I’m also playing vintage spalding custom crafted irons. Got my first full set of Wilson pro staff ADs from the goodwill and instantly fell in love with with Wilson staff irons. A year later bought a mint set of 1988 fluid feels and loved the feeling of hitting the sweet spot.
A few weeks later bought the DUO and would only use that ball until I found the 3 piece FG Tour. Was this a great ball but hard to find. Sadly my love affair with the Wilson brand did not carry over into the wood M3 wood line or FG Tour wedges.
The woods are entirely too loud and hard the hit. The forgiveness factor in the M3 line doesn’t exist.
The wedges have too sharp of a leading edge, good for slicing through rough but bad for tight lies. The FG62 line dis not disappoint, they are buttery soft but you have to make a pure strike to get the most out of them. (THEY ARE BLADES) If Wilson could build a driver and woods that their staff would play I think it would bring back their brand tremendously but until that happens Wilson will continue to be overlooked. Been playing staffs since 1964 when I first started playing. I still feel the 1966-1971 irons were and still are the best ever. A Wilson Staff pro by the name of Butch Hansen in the Atlanta area gave me my first set.
He still lives in Atlanta and so do I. We have remained close friends through the years.
I wrote sports for a daily paper for 30 years. Almost lost both legs in 1978 and he remained close through it all.
He still still works with my game. It used to be a 2-handicap. Not now but I still love the game.
Have a garage full of staff irons. Wouldn’t trade them for anything. Thanks, Mike.
I started playing at the age of 14,I’m 31 now. My first job was at a local country club.
One of the members who was also a family friend gave me an old set of his late fathers clubs a set of Wilson 1200 blade irons from about circa 1978. I thought they were the greatest thing in the world. About 3 years later as the golf empire progressed and I saw all of the member and other employees buying new and fancier clubs I started to think “are these clubs outdated and not as good?” So I put them up and started to play with the new ping irons that had just came out. Now I had the best clubs that we’re currently available. These clubs didn’t improve my game any at all no extra distance no better accuracy but they were the best clubs out there. About a year after I bought them I left the pro shop for a different job and had to cut down on my play time.
Years down the road I pulled out my clubs again started to play after a while I realized it really wasn’t about which clubs I had. It was about learning to hit the clubs that I had. So I took out my old 1200s got them regripped and swung away.
So in short new is not always better. Boy I had several sets of 1976 model MB irons until several operations and injuries forced me to retire them in 2006. I have yet to find a better iron than those, of course my swing speed dropped about 25 mph with my driver since the good old days.
I have gone through over 20 sets of irons since giving up my Wilson Staff’s and can’t find any that can compete with those, all’s I had to do was think the shot in my head and could pull it off, now these new clubs are everything but that. I know the ball has less spin and the irons have square grooves, but I have had all the good brand names, some in blades and some more forgiving. Nothing hits better than Staff FG (vintage) irons. I have played 50 Elite’s for a couple of years and I love the feel and the price. I think they are the best overall value and feel of any ball on the market.
They are not Rock-Flites but also not Pro V’s: just a good compromise ball with a soft feel that won’t piss you off cuz you just threw a $5 bill away if you happen to hit one in the drink or OB like a Pro-V. Played a fat shaft driver a number of years ago. It was a club you loved to look down at, that dark ruby red club head was beautiful.
One of the most beautiful set of blades I have ever seen was a set of Wilsons. This was a couple of years ago.
Cant tell you the model #, but they were art. I love Ping but I will do anything I can to support Wilson: Balls, hats, even irons if the same type of support I get from Ping is there. Wilson were the Pro’s choice in the 1970’s & 80’s. Great stable of tour players and a high% of Club Pro’s, especially those at public courses with high throughput of golfers. FG17 was one of their best blades as 1200GE & 1200TR were hugely successful models that sold well for nearly a decade.
Great range of bags, gloves and accessories and of course who can forget the iconic putter 8803, R90 wedges, Snead and Berg individual models and the ‘Sandy Andy’ SW. All went pear shaped with the Fat Shaft IMO. Although I appreciate they supposedly performed well it was a design step too far for their loyal customers. Never really recovered from then on and were overtaken by innovative new kids on the block together with customization. ‘Every dog has their day’ as they say and Wilson turned left when everyone else turned right. Big shame because was an iconic brand for decades. I doubt whether it can ever be the brand it was with the retail penetration it once enjoyed.
I have been a tech in the retail golf and tennis industry since 1999. One of the things that Wilson did that confused the client was its use of Staff and ProStaff branding. In tennis, Prostaff is a premium brand, but in golf, it represents their value brand. Since over 40% of tennis players are also golfers, Wilson loyal clients got the shaft (excuse the pun), if they didn’t know better. As a tech, I sent back a high percentage of Wilson Prostaff products for broken shafts, heads coming unglued, crowns caving in and welds cracking. That reputation is hard to overcome. By the time they turned around the brand, I couldn’t sell a Wilson Staff set or driver unless it was heavily discounted.
Everyone in the industry knows that at best, golf has plateaued – at worst, it is in freefall. I am seeing more and more clients just keeping their old irons and woods or buying heavily discounted or last year’s products. I wish Wilson well, but I just don’t see them ever recover their iconic place in today’s market.
John Simpson PCS Certified Class A Clubmaker GCA Advanced Clubmaker. I love Wilson irons! I own a primo set of 1989 Goosenecks, a refinished set of 1979 tour blades along with a set of well used 78 tour blades. One day if I save enough coin I would love to get their new 100 yr blades. I agree with the write up.
When I got into golf around 1998 or so, the Wilson Invex (or whatever it was called) was the ugliest thing ever, and Walmart, Canadian Tire had Wilson along with another once great brand, Top Flite. Keep it up Wilson! Cool clubs I own: Hogan Apex 50, Maxfli Aussie blades, Macgregor Mt split soles etc. From the mid sixties to the mid seventies Wilson created Dynapower irons that were sleek and artististic. Players’ clubs, yet they were innovative with removable weight plugs and they were experimenting with cavities and various designs of changing the weight distribution on the back of the heads for playabilty. The bullet backs and the Venturi irons could hold their own with Mizuno and Titleist in today’s market. Bring back a heritage series of irons, bring back a chromed version of many putters like the classic 8802 and 8813 and you will recapture the interest in the brand.
Glance through Jim Kaplan’s book on the Wilson history and there are many clubs that could reignite the name. There might be a few tour players who would actually choose to play them on their own without a sack of cash as an incentive. I have collected and use wilson clubs and find them ok their shape,style and finish i believe is up with the best. My son uses an midsize set loves them,my stepson uses current model blades,rescue,3 wood and maintains a scratch +1 hcp,but on using the current driver has bubbled the crown squashing the face and bulging the top.
Wilson rep replaced damaged head 3 times and together they agreed the face and support design did not have enough strength for his swing,but his choice of replacement was out of left field, not a big seller but rated very high golfspy testers and only one head pressurised. Wow what a trip down memory lane. By the way I’m that Dad you should ask. For the first 20 years of my less than glorious golfing career serious golfers either played Wilson or Mac Gregor. Being a Nicklaus guy I always gamed Jack’s clubs.
Wilson Fat Shaft Driver For Mac
Still think the Muirfields were the best irons I ever played. Neither of the icons ever successfully transited to cavity backs or metal woods at least IMHO. Moving forward Wilson always manufactured great balls and still do from the Smart Core to the Duo. Their recent wood entries are OK. Just bought a D100 which is pretty good but again the fact that it doesn’t have an adjustable hosel (to allow for shaft changes) will eventually prevent it from being a permanent gamer. I’ve been involved with the game since 1962, back then the greats played Wilson Staff! One of them being my golf hero Arnold Palmer.
As a caddy I always knew if a guest came with Staff’s in his bag he was a better than average player. I think there was nothing prettier in golf than the Wilson Staff irons and woods back in the 60’s, they were clean looking and the W/S logo on the club always indicated quality. The Red and White Staff Bag was coveted by caddies, as it usually meant your player could keep it in the short grass.
I do hope to purchase the putter made famous by Arnie, now known as 8802, I love the feel and look and hope to add one back into my bag. I should have NEVER given up the one I had as a kid. Thanks for this great article, looking forward to the next installment, being born and raised in Chicagoland I sure hope Wilson can make a comeback to being a leader again in the golf industry. Just need Wilson to redevelop relationships with club pro shops! Great observations.
Wilson Fat Shaft Driver For Mac Free
I had a front seat to the destruction of the Hogan brand in the mid 90’s. The story follows a similar plot. Numerous ownership changes, management changes, geographic changes lack of a cohesive niche strategy.
One day it’s “green grass only”, the next it’s custom fitting, then apparel, a new golf ball, Metal woods, then retrench to irons and wedges all without sufficient air cover from advertising and tour endorsements. Unless Microsoft or Google decide to start making golf equipment, it’s tough to compete with the massive advertising and sponsorship budgets of the industry leaders. The money just isn’t there for second and third tier golf brands to go head to head with Titleist, Callaway and Taylormade successful brands pick a niche, putters, hybrids, drivers, irons, wedges and put a focus on winning in that category. Wilson and Hogan both failed to realize they were outgunned and kept at strategies which ignored the relative financial strength required in the new world order. Now the only remnant of the Hogan brand is the word “Apex” carved into some Callaway irons at least Wilson has lived to play another day.
Great article and I will read with interest the forthcoming installments. But, there is more to marketing golf clubs than producing good clubs.
I play Bobby Jones hybrids and they are the best clubs in my bag. I’ve played Adams and Taylor Made, etc.
But, I hit the Bobby Jones hybrids absolutely the best. But, they don’t have a big market share. Golfers are very image conscioussnobs, if you will. 30 handicappers will play $2,500 matched Pings just to say they do. And, who doesn’t use an Odyssey putter now. Although I think Padrig Harrington is a Wilson Staff golfer, If theyn can get Tiger or Rory in their stable, they will become instantly credible again. Until thennobody wants to play clubs or balls that are sold at Walmart.
It’s not a good image. Good luck to them though. Interesting articleI grew up with Wilson like many here and play the original FG Tours now. I didn’t know the extent of their WalMart relationship, but their mass marketing, Pepsico ownership was disastrous. Never understood the move to low margin mass marketing.
Brands work years to earn top end status. To squander that status was baffling.
They got out of forged clubs entirely for awhile. That’s when I went elsewhere. The Fat Shafts were a good attempt at reclaiming some technology edge but were uglyI mean the Cleveland VAS were good clubs but were equally ignored in the market. Anyway, the mass market approach was a marketing blunder of epic proportions.
I’ve shared this story before but was at the range of a private club and the guy was next to me was getting ready for a corporate event. He had a set of old Ultra clubs and snapped two of the heads off of woods in 10 minutes. Wilson lost a customer permanently with their junk lines. I love the Staff stuff, particularly the forged irons and wedges. Gamed a Staff mallet for a couple years that worked great at my old club. Point is, their Staff lines are very competitive quality wise and at a better price point than the majority of the competition.
To be fair, years ago I was wanting to play and was tight on funds. I ended up buying a set of Mizuno cast irons with graphite shafts. Worst clubs I’ve ever hit. Numb feel and shafts that loaded up unpredictably and made clubbing accurately impossible. Now, years later I love the quality Mizuno puts out and am aware the junk line was just that.
But for a few years that was my perception. Wilson has the same problem on a much bigger scale. I hope they can make it back into the upper echelon in peoples minds. The current management is making some better decisions (even if some of the commercials conflict with the image of being a serious club builder).
I really hope they survive this. Great articleI’ve definitely seen more from WS in the past couple of years. It appears marketing budgets are starting to come back, always a good sign. It’s definitely a tricky situation to be in. I’d have to imagine that brand awareness is extremely high, the biggest struggle is most likely favorability. That is definitely the most challenging needle to movebut they find themselves in a good position given the over-encumbered nature of their competitors.
Rack up a few more winslet your competition continue to implode (TaylorMade cannot sustain their marketing budgets for much longer with negative ROI), add in some great reviews and don’t fall into the 6 month release cycle and they will definitely keep climbing. I too, grew up with ‘staffs in the bag- and have always maintained the distinction between Wilson and Wilson Staff.
I remember too, that even at their lowest they were making great stuff- ci6 and ci7 were highly reviewed, to the point where i bought a set of ci7’s in ’08 over Titleist, TM, Callaway, etc., and still game them- really good clubs, and I’ll probably keep them until i can justify the layout for a good forged player’s/game improvement set along the lines of fg tour v2, jpx forged, ap series, cb3, etc. This differentiation goes back to even the 60’s where department store models (i.e.
X-31, Blue Ridge) were differentiated from Staff models (i.e. Turf-Riders, Fluid Feel). Even in the 80’s, the Wilson brand had the “hacker’s” balls such as the Aviator and Ultra, while the better ball (i.e.
The wound TC3) was sold as “Wilson Staff”. However, it should be noted that even Wilson’s “mass merchandise” products in the 80’s were still of good quality.
Problem was for the casual golfer that they could not differentiate between the pro-line and mass merchandise products. Companies such as Acushnet did a much better job with differentiating brands such as Titleist for pro-line, and Pinnacle for us mere mortals. Unfortunately even the mass market “Wilson” stuff became such poor quality in the 90;’s-2000’s (i.e. Wilson “Maximum” $5/doz golf balls), that there was almost no way to wash the stink off of the Staff brand. Although their forays into irons have certainly improved, with everything from the modern (Di series, FG series) to the traditional (FG-59, FG-100), I think the most substantial thing they’ve done to rebuild the brand was their golf balls.
Consumers can now distinguish the Duo, 50 Elite, and previous iterations like the C:25 from mass market junk like the Ultra and Velocity. However, rebuilding the confidence of pro shops and specialty retailers will take time – I hope that Wilson reinvests some of its “black ink” into refreshing these sales channels. I’ve seen some of this happening already, and hope they continue.