Entrepreneur turns passion into production
Golf enthusiast creates line of clubs with aim to combine quality and affordability
Hockey Hall of Fame goaltender Grant Fuhr was once asked how he could play 36 holes of golf on an off day between games in the intense 1987 Stanley Cup final between his Edmonton Oilers and the Philadelphia Flyers.
“Because there wasn’t enough time to play 54,” was his reply.
Joshua Haywood wasn’t much of a hockey player in his youth, but he can certainly relate to Fuhr’s passion for the game of golf, even though he was less than two months old when the Oilers won their third Stanley Cup.
Now 33 and the founder of Haywood Golf, a direct-to-consumer golf club manufacturing company based out of Vancouver, Haywood doesn’t get to play as much as he’d like thanks to a two-year-old business that’s growing in leaps and bounds.
“To this day I’d love to go out and play 36 holes, but time and commitments don’t really allow that,” says Haywood, who runs the business with fiancée Haley Lloyd.
Haywood grew up in Pitt Meadows, moving there from West Vancouver at the age of nine when his mother married his stepfather. Their house was near Swaneset Bay Resort and Country Club, where Haywood was a junior member.
But it was his grandparents who introduced him to the game that would eventually become his life’s work.
“I used to spend every summer up at my grandparents’ house on the Shuswap and they would try to find different things for me to do,” remembers Haywood. “One day my grandma said, ‘Let’s take Josh to the pitch and putt,’ so off we went and after a year or two of doing that they realized that I could hit the ball far enough, and was getting good enough.”
They would eventually buy him a summer membership at Shuswap Lake Estates golf course, near Blind Bay on Shuswap Lake.
“I started playing golf eight or 10 hours every day,” said Haywood, who’d have to be dragged off the course some days by his grandparents.
“My grandma would tell me, ‘You used to play 36 to 72 holes some days.’”
Haywood got his handicap down to scratch for a period, and even spent six months on the Douglas College golf team while bouncing from one post-secondary institution to another trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life.
He eventually settled on BCIT and graduated from there in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration.
Haywood would go to work for Small Business B.C., a non-profit organization that helps B.C. entrepreneurs start and grow their own businesses, doing business development and sponsorship.
It was a perfect training ground for what was to come.
By the fall of 2017, Haywood was a regular working stiff, sporting a handicap in the double digits and getting out to play just a couple of times a month if he was lucky. The realization that he needed a new set of wedges set him on a path that he couldn’t have foreseen.
“I walked into a Golftown one day. I needed to buy a new set of wedges as mine were old and the grooves were worn out. So I checked out a new set of Vokeys and by the time I factored everything in, including taxes, it was going to be $650 or $700,” said Haywood.
“I just couldn’t understand why. Wedges haven’t really changed. The dynamics of a wedge are simple. They are steel, there is really nothing special about them, so why are they charging $200-plus per wedge? It didn’t make any sense to me.
“Needless to say, I didn’t buy them. I walked out kind of frustrated because I really wanted a new set of wedges. But there were no affordable, high-quality options that I could see.”
That started Haywood on a quest that would take up most of his free time.
“The idea was instant from that moment, it was just how could I possibly implement it and was it possible? The idea was to come up with a more affordable option for people,” said Haywood.
“I started doing a bunch of research into how clubs are made, and the process that goes into making them. I spent a couple of months sourcing, finding some reputable club manufacturers overseas in Taiwan, Japan and Mainland China. I started getting samples in and talking to the manufacturers to build an understanding of what it took to bring a club to life.
“It took about six months of grinding after I’d finish my day job, testing out all the clubs, the 20 to 30 prototypes that I had made up.”
By June of 2018 he was ready to officially launch Haywood Golf, but not in a storefront in some mall or by loading his product into the back of his car and begging golf stores across Canada and the United States to carry his product.
Using social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, as well as his newly created website, Haywood reached out directly to consumers. The response was positive from the start.
“Without social media, companies like mine wouldn’t be able to succeed. We couldn’t do it without spending a considerable amount of money on marketing and advertising,” said Haywood.
“Starting a new business is always a little scary, you don’t know how people are going to react.
Luckily, we made a product that people responded really positively to.”
Haywood started out by selling those very same wedges that spawned this adventure in the first place, with a non-conforming wedge that offered golfers more spin and control. He quickly brought in a line of conforming wedges and by November of 2019 had launched their line of Signature irons.
They’ve just introduced a Signature putter and have started to pre-sell their newest product, a line of Signature muscle back irons. They’ve also launched a line of golf merchandise including hats and sweaters.
Ian Fraser, the CEO and founder of Tour Experience Golf (TXG), had high praise for Haywood’s Signature irons when reviewing a 7 iron on his Youtube channel last fall.
“It’s got that lovely look of a soft, spinning iron,” Fraser said after watching his video partner Matt Blois hit a few balls with it while using a launch monitor.
“You can’t go any way toward any kind of negative comment about this. It’s great value. It looks good, it sounds good. And by all accounts it feels good.”
Blois agreed after hitting a few dozen balls with the club at TXG’S facility in Ontario.
“I thought there would be a bit of a trade-off in terms of how they felt, but they felt quite good,” said Blois. “It’s a really well-balanced iron.”
The wedges start at $119 a club, with a set of Signature irons going for $799, and their new forged muscle backs at $999, all well below the cost of traditional manufacturers.
“We’ll never make a club where we can’t be competitive on price. The whole goal of our business is to provide more affordable options while maintaining that high quality,” said Haywood.
It’s by selling directly to the consumer that Haywood is able to compete, selling upwards of 1,500 wedges in less than two years and more than 200 sets of irons in just six months.
Haywood’s handicap is at 10 right now, and he shares the frustration of many weekend warriors lamenting the inconsistency of his game.
“I have to laugh because last year my best round was even par and my highest round was like 92, so it’s amazing how different the game can be when you don’t play that often.”
With the golf industry starting to come back to life with the reopening of golf courses throughout the Lower Mainland, it isn’t likely that Haywood is going to get much time to hone his game any time soon.
Like many business owners, he needs to navigate through a new normal as the novel coronavirus pandemic has been a game-changer for everyone.
“This situation with COVID-19 has changed the realities of everybody’s business and growth trajectories,” said Haywood.
“Hopefully, we can continue to receive support and grow our business. Nothing is promised in life. It doesn’t matter how hard you work or how much time you put in, things can always occur in the world that can instantly change everything.
“We aren’t taking any of our success to date for granted, it’s how do we continue to grow and hopefully we can. For us, we’re not taking obscene risks. We’re minimizing our risks to a certain degree. We’re making sure that, from a cash flow standpoint, if something does happen like this again that we’re OK for six or 12 months.”
For now, Haywood will dedicate his time to the launch of the Signature putter and the Signature muscle back irons.
Plus, he and Lloyd have a wedding to reschedule as their plans were put on hold when the pandemic hit.
And, hopefully, he’ll find time to get 18 holes in once in a while, maybe even 36 if he plays his cards right.