Going for the Green

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On the Course. These are boom times for the game of golf. According to the National Golf Foundation, a 6,000-member industry trade group headquartered in Jupiter, Fla., in each of the last three years more than 350 new courses have been built in the United States -- versus an annual average of 110 from 1983 to 1985. According to Alan Crittenden, whose company publishes 25 specialized trade journals dealing with topics such as golf, real estate, and banking, prices for existing courses have risen by 25% in the past couple of years, and a number of pension funds and real estate investment trusts are pouring money into golf-course acquisition and construction. "There's an excess of cash chasing these properties right now," notes Crittenden.

While he sees the pace of course construction slowing in the next few years, he believes the growth in the golfing population will not slacken. A 1994 survey done by the National Golf Foundation revealed that golfers over the age of 50 play an average of 38 rounds a year, versus just 15 for younger golfers. Golfers over 50 also spend at least 50% more on equipment and apparel than younger players do. Furthermore, in the United States today someone turns 50 every 8.4 seconds. By the year 2000, that will happen every 6.8 seconds. Equipment sales at the wholesale level have soared 45% in five years, while apparel sales have risen 30%, according to industry sources.

Changes at the retail level have been equally profound. Today just 20% to 25% of golf clubs and apparel are sold at so-called green-grass sites -- in pro shops connected to courses. Most of the rest are sold out on the highway between the Burger King and the Blockbuster by aggressive discount chains like Nevada Bob's. Mainstream retailers like Kmart and Target have also jumped into the fray, accounting for 20% of equipment and clothing sales.

Pro shops, meanwhile, have been swamped by vendors feeding the growth of the game. Maxwell notes that some 85 manufacturers now make golf shirts. Most golf pros could never afford to carry such breadth; at the same time they lack the inclination to sort through it to see which lines they should carry. The pros still make most of their money giving lessons and booking greens fees.

A Gap in the Trees. It was in that maelstrom of industry change that Maxwell glimpsed an opening. Being a merchandiser at heart, with no course to tend and no tee times to schedule, he could stock an inventory broad enough to overwhelm the average pro shop. Indeed, he carries 20 lines of golf shirts and 40 varieties of shoes. He breaks his apparel lines down into "short stories" within the larger celebration. One of them celebrates four labels that bear the names of legendary golfers: Byron Nelson, Greg Norman, Bobby Jones, and Jack Nicklaus. Maxwell spices up that merchandising tale with visual references to two superhuman golfing events. The first is a collection of news accounts from 1945 that chronicle the 11 straight PGA events won by Nelson. The other is a half-size replica of the roadster that carried Bobby Jones through a New York City ticker-tape parade after he won golf's grand slam in 1930. (Since then, no other golfer has won more than two of the four grand-slam events in one season.)

Elsewhere in the store, Maxwell has devoted another celebration to Polo golfwear. Initially, Polo turned Maxwell down. "They told me they wanted to see me with a couple years under my belt," he recalls. "I told them they'd better come down here and see what they were missing." The president of Polo Golf came. Soon thereafter, Polo asked Maxwell for more space than he wanted to grant and offered him favorable terms on payment. Meanwhile, the presidents of such department stores as Dillard's and Robinson May have also been to visit and take notes. Scarcely a week goes by when someone with a camera, often someone in the trade, doesn't drop in to snap pictures of the layout. Maxwell also receives inquiries from investors wanting to franchise ICOG or otherwise invest in the company. One such visitor to ICOG recently was Ted Cohn, an investment banker from Livingston, N.J., who says he was struck by "the panache that went into this endeavor. I had never seen anything like it before." Cohn adds that if Maxwell "can hit his numbers," he would like to put him in touch with private investors.

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