Breaking: Good Good Golf Partners with Callaway

Good Good Golf – the princes of YouTube golf and a budding apparel company – have officially joined forces with Callaway.

There have been rumblings online about a major announcement coming from Good Good. Speculation has ranged from a simple sponsorship deal with an OEM to an actual acquisition. But in a video released earlier today, the Good Good crew says the partnership goes beyond just a club deal, which they’ve had with various OEMs in the past.

“This ain’t that,” the group said in their video.

It’s not an outright acquisition. But the Good Good guys are calling it a “partnership and collaboration” which will include Callaway golf clubs with Good Good labeling.

Who Is Good Good?

Good Good is a group of five young guys who play golf and make YouTube videos. It launched its first YouTube video in September of 2020 and has since grown to more than 1.1 million subscribers. Good Good also has 462,000 Instagram subscribers and a Subreddit with over 22,000 members. Good Good has also expanded into premium apparel which reflects its youthful “golf is fun” style.

Recently, two longtime members of Good Good left, citing differences of opinion. Even more recently, as in a little over a week ago, Good Good announced a deal with Dick’s Sporting Goods and Golf Galaxy, giving their apparel a national retail presence. This new arrangement with Callaway puts even more juice behind that deal.

Good Good will still produce its regular video content, but the new arrangement will give them access to film with Callaway pros such as Jon Rahm, Xander Schauffle and Francesco Molinari.

The Big Picture

What, you might ask, is in this for Callaway? A formal partnership with a young and very popular group of content creators, for one thing. Good Good is another avenue for reaching consumers directly and allows, through the partnership, to obliquely control the messaging. Callaway is essentially getting a captive audience of over one million young (or at least young at heart) golfers.

It’s marketing gold.

And it’s essentially the reasoning behind the recent and somewhat less formal partnership between No Laying Up and Titleist/FootJoy. No Laying Up, ironically, just ended an arrangement with Callaway. That arrangement, however, wasn’t a “partnership and collaboration.”

For Good Good, the benefits are obvious. While insisting they are maintaining creative control, the group gets the prestige of a formal partnership with the multi-billion-dollar behemoth that is Topgolf Callaway.  They’ve parlayed their unique personalities, humor and passion for golf into a golden opportunity and the rewards that will no doubt come their way.

For both parties, the arrangement is a veritable “good-good.”

Whether this remains a “partnership and collaboration” or eventually morphs into a full-scale acquisition remains unclear. But it would be Callaway’s style to help build Good Good’s brand (not to mention its bottom line) for a year or two and then make the guys an offer they can’t refuse. Or that may already be the plan. As we said, the details are scant at this time.

What Does It Mean To You?

In the short term, probably nothing. But it is reflective of how the fun side of golf and the business side of golf are conflating. Tying social media content creation and commerce is a growing trend. Building an audience and then finding something to sell that audience is smart business. And when the audience is big enough, it’s natural for big OEMs to want a piece of that.

We’ve said for years that Callaway is playing 3-D chess in Klingon while the rest of the industry is playing Chutes and Ladders. While that may be a bit of exaggeration (but, we think, not much of one), Callaway continues to find unique ways to capitalize on new trends to further its interests and to deliver its message the way it wants it delivered.

What started out as a 13 percent ownership stake in this newfangled idea called Topgolf has turned into a billion-dollar-plus a year cash cow. The merger has been so successful it promoted an actual corporate rebranding. And a new partnership with indoor golf simulator/pub grub purveyor Five Iron Golf is still in its infancy but resembles the beginning of the Callaway-Topgolf relationship.

Topgolf Callaway continues to evolve. What Ely started as a hickory-shafted collectibles company has morphed into a  nearly $4 billion lifestyle conglomerate. This partnership with Good Good and its young, golf-is-fun demographic, is a natural.