Although LA Golf has been a part of the golf equipment industry for nearly seven years, I’m still not entirely sure where it fits or even what to make of it.
So, as the company gears up to launch its first driver, it makes sense to revisit the LA Golf timeline to see how we got here (wherever here happens to be).
A brief history of LA Golf
The company showed up on the golf equipment scene in early 2018 when it acquired the inventory, assets and patents of Matrix shafts which had gone belly-up a few months earlier.
At the time, LA Golf Founder and CEO Reed Dickens promised LA Golf wouldn’t be just another run-of-the-mill blasé shaft company. Dickens’ plan was to apply the success of his Marucci (baseball bats) model to golf. That meant implementing a player-owned model that relies on the players themselves to raise awareness.
LA Golf Shafts have been used by Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau, Michelle Wie West and others but it’s fair to say neither the company nor its products have gone entirely mainstream. To be fair, mainstream success in the shaft category typically requires widespread OEM adoption and it’s not like an LA Golf’s $300-plus shafts are coming stock in anything.
As a shaft brand, LA Golf may not be blasé but it’s certainly boutique.
In 2021, LA Golf purchased SIK Golf, primarily for the company’s “descending loft” technology. It’s the same tech COBRA licenses for use in its in 3D-printed putters. The tech is fundamentally sound and arguably the most valuable asset in the LA Golf portfolio although I’m not sure it’s enough to justify the $500-$600 LA Golf charges for its putters.
In early 2023, LA Golf launched the LA Golf ball. Our ball test showed it to be a strong performer, good enough to be considered alongside other top DTC offerings like Maxfli and Vice. That said, with a $70 price tag, it was hard to make a sensible case for LA Golf over those other DTC options, let alone premium OEM offerings – especially if factory-level quality is part of the conversation.
It’s worth a passing mention that LA Golf currently lists the out-of-stock ball at $54.99. Whether the ball is temporarily out of stock, a new one is in the pipeline or it was a permanent casualty of the fire at Launch Technologies remains to be seen.
Putting all this together, the suggestion is that LA Golf’s success to date comes more from buying things (the remnants of a shaft company, a putter brand and a factory golf ball) than creating things and its reputation is built as much on price as on any documented performance benefits.
Its notoriety is due, by and large, to its roster of “Player Partners” like Bryson and DJ. And that brings us to this week and the announcement of pre-sale availability of LA Golf’s upcoming driver lineup and an opportunity to launch something uniquely LA Golf.
The new drivers are listed at $650 which feels steep for a company with no previous product or documented R&D history in the driver category but it does align with LA Golf’s positioning as a premium brand.
LA Golf bills the new drivers as “the first driver to deliver a face and performance shaft to match your swing.”
There is some indication that tagline is attributable to DeChambeau which would make sense given reports of his obsession with bulge and roll and his purported belief that it should be possible to make a driver fly straight regardless of where you hit it.
It’s an interesting theory but this is hardly the first time it has been explored. It’s the reason it will ultimately be important for LA Golf to spell out the particulars of how their designs differ from what’s been done to date.
So far, the information is big on potential but light on detail.
About LA Golf drivers
The LA Golf driver will be available in five models. The name of each appears to bear some relationship to their unique bulge and roll profiles. That gets us these five models: 13-12, 12-11, 10-10, 9-9, 8-7.
A quick reminder: bulge (heel to toe) and roll (top to bottom) refer to the curvature of the face. Plenty has been written about bulge and roll but the simple explanation is they work to offset the gear effect by seeking to create optimal launch conditions from sub-optimal impact.
Bulge works to correct or tune what is generally described as side spin while roll works to increase or decrease launch in conjunction with the increase (low face) or decrease (high face) in spin on off-center impact.
Based on the names alone, it may not be entirely obvious which one is likely right for you. Fortunately, LA Golf has provided a fitting tool.
The heads are designed to fit a range of golfers with swing speeds as low as 89 mph all the way up to long-drive guys with speeds above 135.
To add some additional context, the 9-9 targets swing speeds 125-135 and suggests a nominal loft of eight. The 8-7 is for 135-plus swingers with a nominal loft of four degrees so we’re definitely not targeting the masses.
It’s likely the majority of mere mortals (swing speed above 89) will fit into the 13-12 or 12-11.
The initial description, and the photos for that matter, suggest all the heads are strikingly similar, if not identical, in shape. Same height, same shape (and aerodynamics) … the same everything except for the bulge and roll profiles unique to each model.
That’s based on what’s available now so it’s entirely possible there will be more to the story when the drivers go from pre-sale to for sale but one would hope the photos on the sale pages accurately represent what golfers can buy right now.
With that, $650 is a big ask for me given that the info we have so far suggests LA Golf is pulling one design lever (bulge and roll) to differentiate models in a category where the rest of the industry routinely pulls several.
When the dust settles, LA Golf may, in fact, prove to be the first to specifically market matching bulge and roll with your swing as the thing that makes its drivers better but it borders on absurd to suggest it’s the first company to vary bulge and roll based on the target golfer’s swing.
We could go back further but in interest of recency, tailoring head design to the specifics of your (or any other golfer’s) swing is exactly what Callaway was doing with Paradym Ai Smoke lineup when it talked about designs being optimized for specific buckets of player types. In that case, head shape, face topology and CG location were optimized for a target group of players defined by things like swing speed, attack angle and other aspects of club delivery.
Likewise, in discussing G440 with PING two years ago, the R&D team talked about how data collected from the Stack System informed the face designs for each model, specifically noting how it tuned the bulge profile of the LST to not overcorrect for a higher swing speed player’s toe miss.
Those are just two of several examples as offering different face design optimizations between models is quite literally a part of nearly every driver conversation we have.
It’s also fair to point out that golf companies have been trying to optimize shafts for different player types for as long as any of us can remember. Again, this isn’t new thinking.
More details to follow?
It’s certainly possible LA Golf will add detail and clarity as their drivers become widely available but the initial read is there’s nothing fundamentally new here although the apparent lack of differentiation between models based on anything other than bulge and roll would qualify as unique.
The wild card in all of this is in the implementation.
As I said, Bryson has long-held theories about better optimizing bulge and roll and it’s possible, if not likely, that LA Golf’s particular implementation could be significantly different than anything we’ve seen before. If that’s true, then we might have something to talk about and take a closer look at.
It’s also true there is plenty of risk in taking something that works for Bryson and applying it to the masses.
So with all of that said, I’m certainly curious to see how LA Golf take on bulge and roll differs from everything we’ve seen to date but I’m not convinced leaning into bulge and roll as the most important differentiator between heads designed for different audiences makes the most sense.
It’s certainly not enough to justify $650 during the pre-sale period for an untested driver from a company with no history in the category.
More to come, for sure.
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