With New Carbon Putters, This Disruptor Looks to Keep Pushing Boundaries

LA Golf built its reputation on shafts, with validation from many of the game's top players. Now the company is moving into the heart of the putter market.

LA Golf has cut its teeth in the sport by not apologizing for out-of-the-box ideas, using innovative advances in the face of traditional equipment beliefs, all while embracing stars such as Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau, playing on the controversial LIV Golf tour.

Guilty as charged, says LA Golf founder and CEO Reed Dickens, whose first product out of the gates featured a proprietary anti-vibration material in their graphite shafts.

“There has never been an equipment company that makes shafts and there has never been a shaft company that makes equipment,” Dickens said of LA Golf, which was launched in February 2020 at the very start of the COVID-19 pandemic. “And there has never been a ball company that makes shafts, and there has never been a shaft company that makes balls. That’s us.

“Honestly, the world was shut down most of 2020, so we've really only been out in market two full years. It has been a whirlwind. It has been a wild sprint,” added Dickens, who is a former White House spokesman and the founding CEO of Marucci Sports, a company that ultimately displaced Louisville Slugger as the No. 1 bat in Major League Baseball.

LA Golf’s latest launch includes its next generation of carbon putters, called the “Bel-Air” and “Malibu” series. The rollout comes one year after entering the category with the custom eponymously named LA Golf Putter, which costs $2,500.

Courtesy LA Golf

The new line of LA Golf putters range in price from $499-$599, offering what the company calls “the largest sweet spot in the industry” with its staple anti-vibration carbon shaft, while implementing descending loft face technology.

“For players, half of your time on the golf course and half of your strokes are on the green, right?” Dickens said. “So this was a natural next evolution; it made sense for us to make the complete putter.”

But how would that putter—let’s say a more than crowded equipment field—look, and more importantly to the golfer, feel as the ball leaves the club head?

Dickens said LA Golf chief design officer Jeff Meyer began to brainstorm about just such a product.

“He said to me, ‘hey, I've got an idea to make a putter out of carbon’ and that no one has ever done it before,’ Dickens said. “Jeff said it would be five times less dense than steel and provide a much larger sweet spot.”

The upstart company, the self-proclaimed disrupter of golf, was at it again.

“We have the proprietary materials that allow our putter to absorb that negative vibration and negative feedback. So it's buttery soft,” Dickens said of the all-carbon look.

“That’s what I love about the innovation of startups. In one year, Jeff figured out how to put carbon in a standard size putter head and get the weight right. We’re not just tweaking what's in the market, these putters represent real innovation. And they're also good looking.”

LA Golf is starting to get noticed on a larger stage outside of the likes of 2022 LIV champion Johnson and long bomber DeChambeau, both of whom are on the company’s board of directors.

And per Dickens’ plans, many of the connections to LA Golf are happening organically.

“One of my learning experiences from baseball was we had 44 players invest in Marucci Sports and I don't think we really needed more than four or five,” Dickens said. “One little known fact about us is we have the same number of players using our products on the PGA Tour as we do the LIV Tour. We have the support of players on every tour. I believe we had 13 major champions on the PGA Tour that put our putter shaft in play last year. So we are excited about the players that are using our products, but we don't chase or count numbers. Once your product is validated at the Tour level retailers and consumers don't care whether you have 10, 20, 50, or 100 players on your board.”

To that point, Dickens relayed an interesting story about two-time major champion Collin Morikawa.

“Somebody asked me a couple years ago, ‘Do you want to meet him?’ I said, ‘no, he's an equipment junkie and I feel like he's going to discover our product on his own,'" Dickens said. “And sure enough, a year later people are like, ‘oh, Collin has put your product in play.’”

Dickens stressed that everything LA Golf puts its name on must have a unique performance model attached to it.

“Nobody had innovated shafts in 50 years; every shaft is mass produced and rolled like an ice cream cone in factories overseas, right?” Dickens said. “And you have golfers using putters with a flat face, a solid steel head, a tiny sweet spot and a $5 shaft. 

“We want to be unique, have a material science story and products that our players will use on all tours. And we want to make sure there's social currency. Anything we make, we want to make sure it's sexy and that it's cool. These new putters are sexy and we're hoping to disrupt the putter market with these two products.”