President of Callaway Golf Glenn Hickey breaks down 2025 Elyte Drivers & Golf Tech with | Ep. 407

Hey Tom, great to talk to you again. Looking forward to it. We were talking off the air. Glad you're safe down there because things are kind of going nuts up in LA right now.

It's really sad up in Los Angeles. Our hearts go out to everyone up there, and I know the teams are doing all they can to help out with all the problems up there. Our sister company Travis is based up in Huntington Beach, and they've been pretty proactive in putting some help together and getting up there to really help the people that are misplaced.

2024 was a fun year, as always. We had a lot of success in the marketplace with our AI Smoke family that we talked about last year at this time. At the end of the year, the whole family—each model was the number one selling model in the United States. The driver, fairway, hybrids, and irons all became the number one selling model in their respective categories in 2024, according to Golf Data Tech information. So excited about that. Obviously, consumers love the performance, and it translated into really good success on tour as well. With Xander winning two majors, we're excited to see that. Yuka Saso won the US Women's Open, so three majors with our product, including our new Chrome Tour golf ball. We launched that last year and saw a record high share in the golf ball category. From a share perspective, a great year for Callaway Golf. Consumers took to the product, came into your stores, got fit, and walked out with a product that made them happy when they got out to the golf course. That's what it's all about.

Obviously we're trying to create products that are elite. When you look to get new names and trademark them, if you spell them the way they're normally spelled, it's hard to do. So we like to take a little liberty with the spelling, whether it be with Maverick, Paradigm, or Elite. In this case, for those of you that have been around the business for a while, there's a little inside baseball: our founder Ely Callaway, his name was spelled E-l-y. That's not why we named it Elite, but there is something to that. I think he'd be proud of the line we're putting out and the performance. He was always so focused on product, as is Chip Brewer, our current CEO. Like I said, he'd be really proud of the line that's coming to stores starting tomorrow. Actually, today when we're filming this, today is January 16th. The woods are heading to retail stores tomorrow, January 17th.

Every year we need to do better. If we don't do better, people aren't going to be excited to come into your stores, try them, get fit, and walk out with the newest and latest. It's a constant challenge. Our focus every year is to produce a better product than we have in the market today. To that, we invest over $50 million a year in our R&D team. This year, with the new Elite driver, we used a new capability. We spent $2 million on a titanium prototyping machine where we can actually print prototypes on the spot. Typically, as you're developing new heads and products, you go through CAD and then send the CAD off to our vendors in Asia. They produce the product, ship it back to us, and you can typically go through four or five iterations before it pencils down. You have to make a decision and produce the product. With this new capability of titanium printing right here in-house in Carlsbad, we actually had over 75 prototypes of the Elite driver that we produced. That allowed us to really go out and test them on the range with real golfers. Typically, there's always been a tradeoff when you design a driver between speed and forgiveness. If you make a very forgiving driver, the shape is a little slow. If you try to create a bunch of speed, you typically give up some forgiveness. Because of this opportunity with the rapid prototype machine, we really focused on creating a faster shape without that tradeoff of giving up forgiveness. As we've been out testing it with our consumer panel—about 50 golfers from 80 mph clubhead speed to 120, and from 20 years old to 70 years old—we've seen increases in clubhead speed up to 1.3 mph, increases in ball speed up to 2.1 mph, and that equates to about eight yards in total distance over AI Smoke. They tested it against AI Smoke, which was the number one selling driver in the US in 2024. If we can beat AI Smoke by that much, I think we have something. With the new enhanced AI 10x face, we've also improved dispersion by over 19%. When you typically see a dispersion pattern for a driver, it's long left and short right. What we've really done is straighten that out and tighten it up. So not only is it more consistent left to right, but also front to back. If you get on YouTube and see the reviews from a lot of the people that do driver reviews early in the year, the one thing they keep talking about with this new Elite driver is consistency of distance. I was watching one a couple days ago, and he said he hit it 282, and he had 282, 282, and 282. He was blown away because every single drive went the same distance, which you just don't see typically. That's what we're so proud of: we've enhanced the speed but really improved the consistency of the distance and the dispersion left or right.

No doubt. These 50 golfers I talked about that are testing it, we're not fitting them. They're actually going in just grabbing it and hitting it. I think when golfers come into your store and you can fit them into the right model, the right head, the right loft, and the right shaft, that eight yards might actually end up being more than that.

There's the standard Elite, which is kind of the core, the gut model. Then we have the Elite X, which is a little more draw-biased, a little lower spinning for those that fight that shot to the right, if you're a right-handed golfer. Then we have the Max Fast, which is designed for the clubhead speed-challenged golfer. It's a little lighter, gives them a little more clubhead speed. And obviously the Triple Diamond, which is targeted for the better player, and that's been a staple of ours for a number of years. What we're seeing with the Triple Diamond and the standard is they're definitely more consistent and more forgiving than they've been in the past. We're taking that low spin, high speed product and creating a tighter dispersion pattern with it. That's what everybody can see: more consistency.

It's been great. You always know what they think about it in terms of how quick they convert from last year's product to the new product. In Hawaii a couple weeks ago for the Tournament of Champions event, I think eight of the 12 Callaway guys immediately converted to the new driver. We continue to see that success every week, more and more converting. Xander, they all quickly converted. Xander had still been playing the Rogue ST driver; he was a couple generations behind. He immediately went into the Elite, so that was really good to see.

There are really two key features of the fairway. First is the Floating Tungsten Speed Wave, which we've taken off the face. With fairway woods, you hit it low on the face a lot, so what we're trying to do is increase the speed on low-impact shots with a fairway wood. By bringing that Floating Tungsten Speed Wave off the face, it creates more flex on low-center hits. Then with the Step Sole, as you talked about, that actually improves the impact location. A lot of times people are missing fairway woods kind of all over the face, and a lot of that has to do with turf interaction. With this new Step Sole, we've improved turf interaction by about 57%, which has improved the impact location. People are making more solid contact. I actually played yesterday with some customers and I took the fairway woods out for the first time, and they were unbelievable.

When you talk about the Elite drivers, there's not one Elite driver; there's four. There are multiple fairway woods, hybrids, and irons. We use real swing data from golfers to design these different models. Like in the irons, we haven't talked about that yet, but an HL iron versus an Elite X is for a totally different type of golfer. To try to guess which one's best for you doesn't make a lot of sense. It's way better to go into an Edwin Watts, a Roger Dunn, a Vans, a Golf Mart, or a UA Golf and Ski—I could go on and on. You guys have a lot of brands, I love that. What I love about all of your brands and all your stores is the focus on fitting. I talked to your team back in November; you had a meeting in Las Vegas. Whether it be Golf and Ski when we put a fitting bay, a dedicated fitting store in Boston, or Golf Dot Com where I think the first Callaway fitting bay ever was put in that store in Turkey Lake, you guys have always been focused on the golfer and getting them into the right product. I love that about all the Worldwide Golf locations. It is so important. As the USGA continues to put limitations on what we can do when we design a product, what we're really trying to do is create different models that are going to optimize the game for the various types of golfers. You stand on a driving range and watch 20 people hit; they all have a different swing. There's no way one driver or one set of irons is going to fit all those people. What we do is use real golfer swing data, use our AI capabilities, and create products that are optimized for those different types of golfers. You've got to get in and get fit to get into the right model.

We're going to continue to deliver a product that's exciting for the golfer. In the ball category, we're introducing a new Triple Diamond version of the Chrome Tour golf ball. That's going to be our fastest and lowest spinning Tour ball. I think that's going to be a great product for the better player that creates a lot of speed and is looking for a little less spin. That's going to be exciting. In the putter category with Odyssey—we've been the number one putter in golf for forever, and every week on the PGA Tour we're the number one putter in play—what we're really leaning into is the zero torque trend. We've introduced the new Square to Square putter that came out in November. We're going to have some new models in that that will come out in the springtime. That's a really exciting new product for us, and we're seeing Tour adoption and market momentum. If you want to make more putts, get into one of your stores and get on the putting green and try those out.

Yeah, that was a nice surprise.

Take care, brother.