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Can Clear Become The PXG Of The Golf Ball Business?

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ClearSports

Several years ago, I wrote about the high-priced golf balls from ClearSports and the company’s quirky membership-only model.

That membership model has been discarded, one of several changes instituted by Clear’s new president, Ed Brown. The former president and CEO of Patron Spirits International, Brown built Patron into the world’s biggest ultra-premium tequila brand, expanding sales from 118,000 cases in 2001 to more than 2 million annually.

Brown is now hoping to find the same magic with another small, high-end brand in Clear, which until now hadn’t been found in any pro shop or golf retailer while charging members about $90 a dozen for its golf balls. In addition to scrapping the membership approach, Brown is looking to expand distribution significantly, cutting the price to $68 a dozen, and selling product direct to consumers via the Clear website and by targeting the pro shops of the top 500 clubs in the U.S.

At just under $6 per ball, Clear is still a premium brand. Brown notes that PXG has demonstrated that there’s another level of golf equipment from an expenditure standpoint. The question is whether that extends to golf balls.

Can Clear become the PXG of the golf ball market?

“Guys are willing to spend lots of money on drivers or putters, but they keep those for a while,” says Brown. “With golf balls, you can see a guy pull up in a Rolls Royce at a country club and the next minute you see him fishing balls out of a lake or playing with practice ball. So, that’s a challenge. You’re trying to get somebody to spend a lot of money on a golf ball that might only be there for one shot.”

Brown, though, isn’t one to back down from a challenge. He retired from Patron at the end of 2018 after helping sell the brand to Bacardi Limited, the largest privately held spirits company in the world, for $5.1 billion.

ClearSports

“I just look at it as whether it’s golf, alcohol, clothing, it’s just a consumer brand. If you truly make a great product and you present it in the proper way, then you just take one day at a time,” says Brown. “I’m not a big guy on worrying about how many sales I’m getting this month. It’s more about -- am I getting the quality distribution? Am I getting the right people behind the brand? Am I getting the right people using the brand? With that stuff, I’ll be very patient on how I do this.”

Brown said he’s friendly with Bob Parsons, the billionaire founder of GoDaddy who created PXG, but didn’t seek his advice as he moved into the golf business and shifted his focus from tequila to urethane. Parsons toyed with the idea of making golf balls at one point for about six to eight months before concentrating solely on making clubs.

“The reason our clubs are successful is because they have a huge performance advantage,” says Parsons. “It wasn’t just they put a price on it and we were going to sell it. For golf balls – and I’m not in that market -- but that’s a tough market.”

Brown insists when golfers try Clear’s golf balls – the softer 3-piece Red and firmer 4-piece Black – they’ll see and feel the performance benefits. Costs run higher than the competition because of an involved manufacturing process that includes a proprietary core technology, a premium urethane cover and stringent quality control measures.

“It’s about proving that you are the best, but also getting it out to the masses and marketing it the way that I hope I can,” says Brown, who has changed Clear’s logo and enhanced the packaging. He toyed with changing the name, but opted against it.

“I’m a big guy on simple tag lines, like `Clearly the Best’ or `Clearly Perfect.’ So, I said I can’t change the name.”

ClearSports

Branding was a big part of Patron’s success. Another is that Brown made it beneficial for his distributors to push his tequila. It’s an approach he hopes to emulate with Clear.

“I knew my distributors would sell Patron before any other brand because it was more profitable for them and they were after one thing – the bottom line,” Brown says. “So, I’m going to make Clear more profitable for a pro shop that what a Titleist, TaylorMade or Callaway could be.”

Under the membership model, the Clear balls were popular with former professional athletes and celebrities. Brown says he wants to target other types of influencers going forward, particularly partnering with some PGA TOUR and LPGA players. The first pro to play Clear’s golf balls is Skip Kendall on the Champions Tour.

Brown knows that challenging the established brands will be an uphill climb, particularly because they have the big marketing budgets (and revenues) that he enjoyed at Patron.

“I think there’s room out there for an alternative, as long as it’s a good product,” says Brown. “If someone can play the ball and feel and see the difference, then you have a chance. The way I look at this, you don’t have to get a huge piece of their business. You get five percent and that’s a tremendous amount of sales.”

ClearSports

So, can Clear do for golf balls what PXG did for golf clubs?

Parsons says he wishes Brown “all the success in the world,” but acknowledges that it might be challenging without the scale that the big-name golf ball brands have.

“I can remember when I first met Bob, I said I could understand GoDaddy, but golf clubs, and at this price?” says Brown. “He goes, “You might think I’m crazy but I’ll be making money in a year.’ And he did.

"You have a couple of those years that are hard work," he adds. "But if it hits, it will be good.”

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