Welcome back to Today's Golfer's YouTube channel. Today we have got the absolute pleasure of being joined by Mr Sean Toulon of Toulon Golf. It's great to be able to talk to you Sean, thank you very much for your time today.
We've obviously got some ground to cover with some questions but I think probably the easiest way to get started is let's talk a little bit about current product line. Now you've been very kind to send me out one of the new Putters which I have in San Diego and it is, I mean they were pretty before, I had a 22 edition of the Toulon line but the chocolate finish it looks absolutely incredible. A little bit of a different sound to this one compared to mine but it's something I like. Tell me a little bit more about kind of the design aspect for the 24 collection and also just why the chocolate color, it's quite unique.
Thank you. Well thanks for the kind words first of all, Lewis. In designing the 24 line we really focused on three things. One was sound and feel, and we felt like we could make some improvements over what we had done in the past. Sound and feel is just such an important part of putting and being able to kind of calibrate your distance control and just the whole experience, right? So we believe that, and the difference in sound that we wanted is we wanted a little bit more audio feedback than perhaps we did before with the Deep Diamond Mill, which we love that pattern, but it tends to be a little quieter. So we wanted to bring the feedback up a little bit more and we wanted to make the sound a little deeper, it just feels a little richer. So that had a lot to do with the different shapes that we did but especially the Milling pattern has a pretty big impact on that. So we went with this double fly cut that's kind of done in a middle depth, so not real shallow. If we make it shallower it does tend to get a little clickier, the ball would come off maybe just a smidge faster. So we were sort of looking for a sweet spot which, that was about five or six prototypes in is when we really focused on what we have and kind of honed in on that one. So sound and feel was really important. The look, you know over the years, I used to always think that I'm a big fan of Scotty Cameron's work and I used to always think, you know I don't really know that you can make a putter, a blade in particular, more beautiful than what he does, and that would be a compliment at the highest level for me. And then with the team here we just started thinking like well damn it, we should at least try, right? And if you were going to do that what would you do differently? So we really dug into Milling techniques which has a lot to do with the speed at which you Mill and the feed and how fast all of that happens. And we started working on some different ideas specifically in Japan where if we could go really really slow on both the speed and the feed of the machines as we're doing the CNC work we could begin to really get a different level of finish quality which is really cool. The bad news is when it's on a machine for much longer, time is money, right? So as you start to do this, you know the price points begin to change a little bit. But I said early on to the group let's not worry about the price, let's worry about can we make what we believe are the most beautiful milled Putters in the world and we'll deal with the outcome after that and we'll decide if it's worth it or not. So when we started to do these things specifically in Japan, in the Japanese Marketplace, you know the quality level is held to a different standard than it is in other parts of the world and it's just cultural, right? So we thought if we could create the most beautiful milled Putters in the world really as looked through the eyes of a Japanese golf aficionado, my guess is that would play well across the world. You know whether or not people love the price point or not that would be different but if you could really truly make it more beautiful what would that look like? And that's what we came up with. And as we anticipated, you know they don't come with a low price point for sure but we just felt like it was a separator and in the end we think we can make them more beautiful than the guy who's done an amazing job forever, right? And then when we started looking at a different level of finish and a different color and a different depth that we could get because of this Milling technique that we use which we just call slow mill, you know they just took on a totally different personality and a totally different kind of emotional vibe. And anyways it's a long answer to your question but I think it's awesome. And then the final thing is what can we do to make them perform at a higher level and that was all about trying to get the CG closer to the face and protect ball speed more when you mishit it and things like that. But what we really thought we could bring to the table was just a higher level of visceral impact which I think we did.
Yeah absolutely. It's interesting you say about the Japanese market and you've obviously got Toru involved with Toulon Golf now who I imagine has been essential in trying to understand more about the Asian Marketplace as well.
Very, yeah. He's been great. No it's obviously a fantastic looking putter. I've only really had a few sessions with it so far but it's already outstanding. It's definitely going in the bag. It's just now a question of whether or not I can be bothered to take the shaft out of mine and switch it over or just stick with it. But it's a very good looking one.
Obviously it's a family affair. How do you guys spend every day not having an argument with each other? Because I know from experience with my dad I would not be able to work with him. But how do you guys get on as a family unit?
We argue every day, sometimes vehemently, but it's always passionate and it's always about how do we make things better. And it's not always just the product, it's the consumer experience, it's how we interact with the golfers which we love to do and we love to stay close. And you know the fact that we're a small independent we're able to get a lot more one-on-one with our clients which is amazing. But it also has, you know it comes down to how do we package them, you know just every fine little tiny detail. And I think we all bring certain strengths to the table and things that individual little pieces that everybody is really passionate about. Tony for instance, my son Tony, he is incredibly passionate about every touch point that we give to the consumer. So when a small batch box shows up, God forbid there's a fingerprint on it because he will totally lose his mind if there is, right? All the little things that go in the box, are they packaged perfectly, everything that you touch is it pleasant to the touch, are there any sharp edges or anything like that. So it's a total experiential effect that we're really going for. And in the end I am way okay with the arguments as long as they're done in a passionate let's make it better for the golfer viewpoint. So it's not without an occasional bloody nose but for the most part it's good.
Super. You've obviously had a fantastic career in the golf industry. How does a man from Madison Wisconsin move up into some of the highest echelons of the golf industry? Talk me through your journey a little bit.
Lucky enough Lewis to know that I fell in love with the game at a young age, right? And you know like any decent player, 12 year old, right? And I will tell you what was a decent 12 year old player 52 years ago is very different than what a decent 12 year old player is today. But you know I had dreams of playing golf for a living and I thought that would be cool. And I would say in college I had the realization that that probably wasn't going to be my path. I was a nice player but you know shooting 73 or 74 in college was okay back then but it certainly wasn't, it wouldn't be close to good enough now, right? So I came to that realization but I just loved the game and more importantly I think I loved the way golfers carried themselves and everything around that, the history, the tradition, the reverence. I loved that. And then I got totally interested in equipment. And I just knew that when I graduated from school, I went to the University of Wisconsin, that I wanted to be in golf. I knew I didn't want to be a club pro, I didn't want to chase that path. And I just fell in love with equipment so I chased that dream. And I was lucky enough, one of my very, like six months into being done with school, I was selling equipment and I got a call from the guy that was in charge of sales at this tiny little company, this was in 1982, named TaylorMade. And they were looking for a sales rep in Wisconsin and Minnesota which was where I was based. And I had had the occasion over the years to have met Gary Adams who was the founder of the company and this guy was just larger than life. And anyways long story short, TaylorMade was about a $10 million company at the time. They interviewed me for the job, they gave it to me, and what they forgot to tell me Lewis is they were about 10 minutes from going bankrupt which thank God they didn't tell me because I would have passed. And you know I ended up spending 20 years of my life there and when I left it wasn't a $10 million company, it was about 1.8 billion and we changed the game. So to have an opportunity to do that and be a part of that with an incredible team, many of the people are dear friends of mine today, is mind-blowing. So that was pretty cool. It was luck, if you ask me how do you get started, how do you follow that path, it's honestly a lot of it is dumbass luck.
Yeah I'm familiar with the feeling definitely. So Ian, talking about your time at TaylorMade, there are several models that are obviously attributed to you, R7, R9, R11, the M1, M2, the Spider putter. I'd like to kind of know your thoughts about kind of which releases are you kind of most proud of from your time with TaylorMade and which ones do you feel like kind of define your career at the company?
I think the very first project that I got to work on, well I came back to the company after Mark King was named CEO. I was working myself and Kay Long and another fellow named Steve Pelisek were running Cobra. And to be quite frank I hated it. Acushnet is a wonderful company but they operate in a very very slow timeline and I just was never wired that way. So when I got recruited to come back, my mentor in golf was Gary Adams the founder of the company. I am so much of what I am today because of my parents and because of Gary Adams. And my very first day back was the day after Gary Adams died, so that was January 2nd I believe 2000. And I'm a big believer in faith and I believe that my role at the company was to keep his spirit alive and that was about being curious, new ideas, new thinking, innovating. And if people said it couldn't be done it was like the hell it can't be, right? And so the first project that we were, that I worked on was 300 series. And when I got there they had been working on this new concept that was called NCC, new club concept. And it was really kind of a fitting philosophy which I had a lot of experience with because I had founded Zill Golf which was one of the premier custom fitted club companies back in the early 90s, right? So I knew a lot about that and sort of how golfers interact. And so they had an interesting concept that they had been working on but it was in my opinion it was a mess. It was a little of this, a little of this, and a little of that. And TaylorMade at the time was really lost. They had the FireSole driver and I'll give you this stat because this is pretty amazing and this is when you know you have a product problem. We had at the time 27 paid PGA Tour staff players paid to play the driver and our average tour count on the Darrell survey every week was seven, which meant 20 players were cheating on their contracts, right? Because the products were so bad they couldn't play it. And if you saw what we had to do to try to get one prepared properly so Ernie Els could play it, I mean it looked like a bad science project by the time it was done. It was bent and burned and jimmied around just so it could maybe work. I mean it was awful. So there were three hot drivers at the time in the marketplace and one was the Titleist 975D, one was a Ping TiSi, and the Callaway driver was, I can't remember, it was some great big bird, the Hawkeye, I can't remember exactly which one it was but it was three. And when you really looked at the three clubs there was one that was high launch low spin, that was the Ping driver which was just a monster. There was the 975D which was kind of a low launch low spin, and we didn't really know anything about launch angles and spin rates because this was all pre-Trackman, right? And then the Callaway driver was, which was the type of driver that Ernie needed, and like Jim Furyk was sort of a mid-launch higher spin club. So we looked at those and I said I think this new club concept what we need is, everybody was expecting us to come with a new driver, and what the 300 series was was how do we improve the 975D, how do we improve the Ping driver, and how do we improve the Callaway driver. And we put these things together along with some of these ideas that they had under this new club concept and said we're going to out-Titleist Titleist, we're going to out-Ping Ping, and we're going to out-Callaway Callaway. And that became the 300 series driver. And the idea was one driver fits nobody and that if you really looked at these buckets there were big buckets of players both on the tours around the world but especially in the marketplace. And what the innovation that we really brought to the table was a face that was really flexible and that's something that TaylorMade had, they just didn't know what to do with it. So I was able to come together, take this technology package, fit it totally differently, fit it into a marketplace where they were expecting one and we had three. And our counts on tour went like, we became the number one played driver on tour in about four months. And it just totally changed the trajectory of the company. But more important Lewis it changed the belief that we could do great things. So that was the first one. This next one I won't take as much time on but I wrote the product plan for the 300 series, I remember to the day, on January 11th, so on like my fifth day in the office, right? That where one driver fits none and that a given driver is capable of producing one set of launch conditions, you know right? So and you need more than one. And I remember writing that note down or typing it on my computer, a driver is capable of producing one set of launch conditions. And the light bulb moment was well what if it wasn't? What if it could produce more than one? And in order to do that you'd have to be able to move the CG and if you were going to be able to move the CG you were going to have to change weight. And that moment became the very beginning, before well before we launched 300 series, we started to work on the R7. And the R7 was if we could take enough mass and push it into different places we could begin to change launch angle, spin rate, acoustics, all kinds of things. And that process started on January 11th 2000. It was pretty cool. So that became the really, that's when we did the R7 driver, that's when our company went this way and the entrance from Callaway was C4. So they took a left, we took a right. You don't always pick the right path but this time we did and the companies just separated. That was the defining moment. The first one was 300 series, the second one was, you know we were off to the races with R7 and then we just went down this path of innovation that was mind-blowing. It was cool.
I mean you can absolutely see the lineage even now with the R7 and not just within TaylorMade, within pretty much every manufacturer within the industry. There's a lot of kind of talk at the moment of reaching maximum levels of COR, all of that jazz. It feels to an extent like we've put the weight as far forward as we can with things like SLR, we're now kind of pulling them back as far as we can. Do you feel like there is a, that design still has a larger future in golf equipment or are we largely now kind of chasing CG around the driver head?
I would say it will continue to change and evolve and get better. How much it gets better, I believe the path is still pretty rich. And there are just things now that you can do with AI for instance. And I think what Callaway is doing with AI is amazing. And how they're using AI is so different than how everybody else is doing it. But what I mean by that Lewis is just the, it used to be that you know drivers on a one-year product life cycle or a two-year product life cycle, the difference between cycles was very small. But the number of iterations now through AI that they can simulate and run different models, what they can get done now in a very short period of time because they're running tens of thousands of simulations now, which you know you used to get five, now you get tens of thousands, right? So the speed at which you can improve a product is way faster now than it used to be. So they're really smart people totally dedicated to what they're doing. And not just one company but a lot of companies but I would say Callaway at this point has spent way more money and is far ahead. I just think what they're going to be able to do from iteration to iteration is going to be greater and I still think the path is quite rich.
Absolutely. So 2015 comes around, you leave TaylorMade, you decide obviously to set up your own company with your boys. From even from the kind of the initial conception of Toulon it always seemed to me to be like you certainly have modern design elements, it was obviously the idea of vacuum brazing, all of these things, but it feels to be kind of more like an old school mentality. We contrast kind of the future of the game with what's happening at the moment. Was that always something that was key to you or am I kind of, have I read into something that maybe isn't actually there?
No I think you're accurate. And you asked me a question early, do you fight? Oh yes we fight. And Tony in particular is a very old school sort of, I would say that he wanted from the very beginning to really focus on making Putters just incredibly beautiful. And I started by saying I didn't really believe that you could make a putter more beautiful than what Scotty had done, right? So I felt like we could make it at least as pretty. But I really felt like early on, and this is I'm just coming from TaylorMade, right? So my mindset was around innovation and pushing the envelope and what can you do to make it really perform differently. So our focus and our arguments were really around do we make it try to make it even more beautiful. And I remember having the argument with Tony is I think we can try but I'm not sure that's going to resonate with the golfer as much as what can we do to help, you know, sound and feel and roll and things like that. And his argument was I'm not sure we can make that different enough really. So we really focused on trying to, but Scotty frankly was quite vulnerable there if you could really come up with something in my mind that would perform dramatically different. So we really began to focus more on how do we make the putter pretty but really can we make a step change in milled putter performance. And the answer was maybe on both sides, right? So we really tried to focus on that. And to be quite frank in 2015 I think we did a nice job but I think we fell short on making the product as beautiful as we could and I think we fell short on really moving the performance paradigm far enough, right? So I think we did a really nice product and we tackled some things like brazing that were incredibly difficult and probably not worth it in the long run. So we, you know you always make some calculated decisions and risks and some turn out to be smarter than others. We learned.
So a year and a half later 2016 comes around, Callaway steps in, they've obviously purchased Toulon Design at the time and you go on board as GM of Odyssey, Senior Vice President of Callaway. I'm interested to know the conversations that were had for you to not only go back into obviously a larger company as opposed to your independent one but also how does it feel kind of going from a rival to another rival as it were?
