Word: golfed
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...debut at the new division, he deliberately chose to craft a set of high-performance tour clubs to gain the trust of the world's best players, learn what they wanted and build Nike's reputation in the golf world. Nike Golf's first line of clubs, the ProCombo irons, were targeted at the top 2% of the 27 million golfers hitting the links each year. "We wanted to establish that we could make a product for the best-performing athlete and the best players," says Cindy Davis, U.S. general manager for Nike Golf. "Starting...
...Golf and Nike were not obviously made for each other. Indeed, everything about the golf business was contrary to Nike's corporate DNA. Its core business was footwear and apparel, but golf was driven by equipment. Nike distributed to large national accounts such as J.C. Penney and Foot Locker, while golf products were sold in pro shops and specialty retailers that did nowhere near the volume of business that Nike was used to handling. "The only way to run golf successfully was to run it totally separate from the rest of the company," Nike's Wood says...
...separate unit, Nike Golf, with its own staff and, by the happy accident of construction on Nike's main campus, its own rented building a mile from corporate headquarters. It would then take Nike Golf two years to produce something that Woods could use, the Tour Accuracy golf ball, which Woods promptly teed up to post victories at the U.S. Open, British Open and PGA Championships...
Still, one golf ball does not a golf-gear maker make, so in 2001 Wood hired Tom Stites, a soft-spoken, well-respected club designer. On a wall in Stites' small office at the Research and Development Facility in Fort Worth, Texas, the message "Innovate or Die" headlines the whiteboard that serves as Stites' cocktail napkin of ideas. "I keep my blinds closed," he says with a smile, to keep that valuable piece of wall decoration away from prying eyes. Stites learned his craft from tour-champion Ben Hogan, and when he joined Nike, he arrived armed with...
Sustaining that appeal will only get harder, but Nike's mass-marketing prowess and global reach could give it an advantage over its golf-only competitors. Nike Golf is already well represented in major retailers, including sporting-goods chains, and is steadily adding accounts in golf-course pro shops, where its market penetration is about 50%. Nike Golf has opened 75 stores in China, and it has its eye on South Korea as well. To show that it can compete with the high-end service of its competitors, Nike plans later this year to provide custom fitting, a feature that...