Priority Designs – Innovation in Golf Club Design

The Guys Behind the Guys

How does a golf equipment manufacturer arrive at its final product, season after season, cycle after cycle? As in any other industry, there is a lot going on behind the scenes - materials R&D, branding initiatives, consumer research, and design, to name a few. In order to compete year after year, golf companies will sometimes look outside their walls and enlist the help of consulting firms.

Priority Designs is one of those firms.

As some of you may already know, from 2001-2009, Priority Designs, a small industrial design consultancy based in Columbus Ohio, played a significant role in the creation of many signature TaylorMade Products. Priority Designs currently works with Nike Golf, along with other names you might recognize inside the golf industry. They are the unsung heroes whose job it is to quietly help shape groundbreaking new products.

We asked Priority Designs to share with you a bit more of the whats and hows behind what they do. This first piece in a series of articles will introduce you to the company and its work, along with the story of how a faucet provided a most-unexpected introduction to the golf industry.

Priority Designs - In Our Own Words

By: Priority Designs

How do you get golf lovers to spend $300-500 on the latest new driver, on an annual basis no less? What is in the special sauce of technology, design, engineering and sensual appeal that will propel our kind to deploy the credit card and get that club in our bag? These are the kind of questions we, at Priority Designs, might ask when we consider who is going to be using the products we design. As much as golf is an individual sport, developing innovative new clubs requires a large team; this is a bit of the tale of how we’ve managed to dive deep into the golf industry over the last 25 years.

The Back Story

Priority Designs ("PD") was started in 1990 and has grown to about 55 designers, engineers, and prototypers. Paul Kolada, our founder, got his start designing faucets, tubs and the like at Kohler Company in Wisconsin. Relationships formed there were the basis for his new firm’s connections to American Standard and Moen Plumbing. As PD grew, Paul was itching to design sporting goods but needed to show what his team could do.  So we developed a “concept car” which was called the Eqwip Glove.

It was an out-of-the-box softball glove made of polymers (read: no leather) that could be molded to have unique details that you could never achieve with a traditional glove. It has ribs that act as shock absorbers in the heel of the hand, molded raised details at the ends of the fingers that help prevent the ball from slipping out, and flexibility/stiffening in all the right places. The materials also mean that there’s no cow to kill, hide to tan, or break-in period. It could be molded in team colors and the batting style glove that your hand is in can be changed out either for a growing hand or a sweaty one. Keep in mind that this was designed, developed, and prototyped in 1993.

Pulling it out of the bag opened the doors for PD to work with companies like Rawlings, STX, Schutt, and Cannondale. The PD sports portfolio is now large and includes, among other things, lacrosse sticks, helmets of every kind, wearable technologies, and state-of-the-art concussion mitigation devices.

 

A Three Billion Dollar Faucet and an Intro to Golf

The crevasse between faucets and golf clubs as “design problems” got considerably smaller when PD designed the Monticello faucet for Moen.

This contemporary classic design was innovative in that it crossed categories of home décor and was equally attractive in a traditional home as a modern one. And then it brought in over 3 billion dollars in sales. It’s a little odd to earn your designer street cred on a bathroom faucet, but it’s a perfect testament to PD’s internal motto to “build your career on the success of others”. But those are real sales and those are the kind of things that get noticed.

It got noticed by Fortune Brands, which owned both Moen and Acushnet, and oh yeah, Acushnet owned Titleist Golf. At that time, golf products often gave a nod to the history of the game and PD’s ability to respect tradition while bringing innovation solidified the connection. Titleist used PD’s team to help develop stand bags, gloves, and some putters in the era of the Titleist Howitzer. Nothing terribly significant hit the sales charts but it opened doors and allowed the PD team to meet a lot of people.

OPTIONS NOT EGOS

As it goes with many industries, marketing teams and engineers move around, and when they’ve found a great resource to work with, they invite them into their new company. It was just that kind of encounter at the 2000 PGA show where Sean Toulon, just recently brought on to the leadership team at TaylorMade, and a couple of guys at the bar saw Paul and the PD team walking by and shouted…"I’m going to need some design help, I’ll call you next week!” That was how PD was introduced to TaylorMade Golf. TaylorMade was 4th in the industry and was languishing in a copper color branding malaise.

The new leaders were charged with rebuilding TaylorMade. PD became a part of the team to help provide fresh eyes, creative energy, and a lot of horsepower for a “ground-up” rebranding effort. The rest, as they say, is history… a dynamic team was in place and ideas were brought to reality at an incredible pace, and with a laser-like focus on achieving “the best performance golf brand in the world”.

The PD era produced clubs ranging from the 300 Series to the Rossa Spider Putter to the R7. In the eight years that PD worked with TaylorMade, TM went from a 300 million dollar company to a 1 billion dollar one. Granted, design is only one factor of TaylorMade’s success, but it’s a correlation that one might not want to ignore.

Where do the trends come from?

When the words golf and design are put together, it can mean a lot of things. As a consultancy, PD works with broad categories of products including medical/surgical tools, appliances, industrial equipment, and electronics. Cross-pollination from these diverse areas allows designers to use other industries to influence and inform golf products. We regularly check out auto shows and design-centric publications/websites from around the world. For designers, it’s fun to go to industry tradeshows and learn that the designers at GM have our golf club designs on their “inspiration wall” in the same manner that we have their work on our wall!

The Right Kind of Cool

But design work is not about producing something that’s cool…it has to be the right kind of cool. Or to be more business-speak appropriate, the aesthetics need to exemplify the core brand values. The design needs to express the brand language and ideas without words. What you see and feel when a club is in your hand is intended to connect you to the ideas that the brand embodies (like innovation and tradition, or fashion and technology, or simplicity and confidence). Each brand has their own message that is translated via forms, materials, colors, and textures to the user experiences. In keeping with the TMAG theme… the 300 series of drivers featured an understated dark metallic, (serious, committed) finish over a bold soleplate of highly polished titanium (again, boldness with an unabashed reference to their heritage as the originator and innovators of the metalwood). Add a discreet crown centering logo treatment and you’re looking at a club that screams confidence. And did we mention that there were 3 models to choose from? That was another “shot across the bow of the industry” to show that innovations were coming from TaylorMade and they weren’t going to stop.

Changing another industry, the R7

Once the brand direction was established, and the 300 Series began driving growth, the focus shifted to more innovative ways to fit clubs to golfers. The R7 was born from brainstorming and technology enabled “mass customization”. It’s important to note that moving the weights around has happened for years and years, but it took an uncanny combination of market insights, timing, brand strategy, advances in manufacturing technology, product and UX (user experience) design to create the R7 - the club that has most reshaped the industry in the last 20 years. When asked for the most important part of the R7 success story, we, at PD, would say that it is no one thing but rather the dozen different disciplines that worked in concert toward one goal.

Special praise goes to the graphics and UX team at TMAG that elegantly wrangled mounds of information and new functionality into an easy to use experience. This is the place where design takes complexity and brings it to order, just as you might see in your iPod or office furniture system.

SWAN SONG

And finally, there is The MOAD (Mother of All Drivers). The actual, one-of-a-kind prototype was shown by TaylorMade at the 2014 PGA Show. The reveal ended a 5-year period of secrecy and confinement inside a locked case, viewed very rarely by a select few. This break-the-rules concept was synchronized with TaylorMade’s conversation about ways to innovate and improve (think: save) the game of Golf. The initiative began years earlier with the directive to visualize and demonstrate opportunities for club improvement “if the rules were different”. This is another fundamental trait of a well-run development team: the willingness to take a risk and allow development off the critical path.

In other words, The MOAD was golf's first equivalent to a "concept car". It was never intended to be for sale, but its purpose in life was to inspire, challenge, and see what happens when you are allowed to break a few rules and think outside the box. For us, it harkens back to that polymer softball glove we made in 1994, when we got to push all the boundaries and see the creative possibilities... this is Priority Designs' favorite thing to do.