Vice Golf Grows Up: Why A DTC Stalwart is Going Retail

I stumbled upon the craziest thing at a PGA TOUR Superstore several months ago: row after row of Vice Golf balls.

The whole family was there. All three Vice Pros, Vice Tour, Vice Drive plus some cool custom dozens. I had thought Vice was exclusively direct to consumer.

“What in the actual f**k is this?” I muttered in what I thought was a whisper. (The surprisingly responsive store security team felt otherwise.)

Vice Golf was the OG of direct-to-consumer brands. It wrote the playbook. I vividly remember online ads where they would literally cut out the middleman.

Like, with a machete.

Someone was having an existential crisis. The only question was whether it was Vice Golf or me.

Turns out it was me.

Your eyes do not deceive you, dear readers. In the parlance of the theater, Vice Golf is breaking the fourth wall and embracing retail distribution for its golf balls and, more importantly, its new (and soon-to-be expanding) line of golf clubs.

We had to make some phone calls to find out just what the heck was up. Turns out this shift into the retail space is the latest move in Vice Golf’s long-term plan to become a full-line mainstream OEM.

Buckle up, Golfspies. It’s a doozy of a story.

Why is Vice Golf going retail?

You won’t find Vice Golf in any official golf ball market share listings because DTC brands aren’t counted. If they were, it’s our guess Vice Golf might be battling Srixon and Bridgestone for the fourth and fifth spots behind TaylorMade, Callaway and Titleist.

But that’s just a guess.

“Our slogan Top Performance, Half the Price is still valid,” Vice Golf Chief Growth Officer Benny Pfister tells MyGolfSpy. “We’re very good at online marketing but people buy a lot of golf balls and golf clubs at golf stores and green grass retail.”

This process has been in the works for at least two years, ever since Vice Golf merged with Munich-based fitting studio HIO. That merger culminated in Vice launching its line of irons, wedges and putters last summer.

That launch indicated Vice’s long-term intention to be a full-line mainstream OEM. To do that, it would need to grow faster than its DTC model would allow. In other words, it needed to have its stuff at retail where golfers still spend a lot of money. Surprisingly, Vice found retailers had a mutual interest.

“We’ve had nice conversations with retailers over the last two years about working together,” says Pfister. “I was surprisingly shocked when several of them told us customers had been coming into their stores asking for Vice Golf balls and they had to say, ‘We don’t have them.’”

A 10-year on-ramp

I think we can agree golfers are, by nature, conservative when it comes to products. We’ll gladly try anything new … provided our father or grandfather tried it first. Retailers bring that reticence to an entirely new level. There has to be a perceived customer demand, the vendor has to be able to deliver the volumes and the pricing has to be right.

In 2012, Vice Golf founders Ingo Duellmann and Rainer Stoekl had a website and 5,000 dozen balls packed into a tiny Bavarian warehouse. If they had shown up at a retailer, they would have gotten the old “Geh weg, Kind, du störst mich.”

(Which, roughly translated, means, “Go away kid, ya bother me.”)

Today, Vice Golf is in a much different place. Retailers want to sell Vice and Vice wants retailers to sell Vice. The one hang-up, however, is Vice is still selling Vice as an active DTC brand.

“Our online marketing is the only reason we exist as an established brand now,” explains Pfister. “A golfer may see something on Instagram or TikTok from us and they’ll think of it the next time they go into a store. If they see it, they’ll buy it.”

Online selling has created a unique dynamic but if you think the whole “you want me to sell your balls and clubs but you’re openly competing with me online” thing is uniquely American, think again. Pfister says it’s much worse in Europe.

“You just have to explain it to people,” says Pfister. “Sure, a customer can see Vice in a store and then go home and buy it online. By now, though, Vice Golf is an established brand and if it’s in the store, people will want to buy it.”

 Yeah, but what’s going to happen with price?

When you’ve made your mark on cutting out the middleman, one must wonder what will happen when the middleman is suddenly cut back in.

Will retail markup kill what had been a pretty good deal? Pfister (predictably) says no.

And he shows the math.

“Online marketing is very expensive and the DTC world is very competitive. Amazon is selling an awful lot of golf stuff these days and they’re spending heavily for clicks on Google and Meta. Paying for those clicks is getting more expensive for all of us.”

So it’s either give your money to Google and Meta for buy-now clicks or spend much less for brand-building campaigns and give a fair cut to your retailers.

“The big brands are also spending heavily to get clicks so it’s getting tougher and more expensive to sell DTC,” says Pfister. “Going retail is logical for us and, besides, I prefer someone buying in a retail shop because they can talk to someone who understands golf balls and can give a fair recommendation.”

The custom advantage

Another thing Vice Golf has become very good at is customization, both in logoed balls and in custom packaging. That, in many ways, is its retail ace in the hole.

“Something like 40 percent of our golf ball sales are customized with a logo or some kind of personalization,” Pfister says. “Say a green grass account wants to order 50 dozen with their club logo. We can do that and go even further with customized packaging right down to the sleeves themselves.

“We can do packaging with artwork that’s built around their signature hole or something like that. We have fast turnaround, too. Our creative and operational teams are very good.”

Vice is famous for its annual limited editions for the four majors. Last year, it had the Ode to Augusta, the Viking-themed Voyage to Valhalla, a forest orange-tinted Pine(hurst) and a Postage Stamp and wildlife-themed Letters to Troon. They’ll do another quartet for this year’s majors plus a fifth offering for the Ryder Cup at Bethpage.

Vice Golf: Clubs are the big picture

For retailers, golf balls are easy. They don’t take up much space, time, energy or effort on the floor and sales associates can get up to speed quickly.

Clubs are a different story. There’s inventory, fitting carts, in-depth sales associate training and more. Vice started with a heads-only deal with Club Champion but its next step eschews big box stores in favor of smaller retailers and fitters. Pfister calls them “local heroes.”

“They’re not big operations. Most of them are still owned by the founder. They’ve known their customers for years and have developed trust. They want to make their customers happy which is how it should work.”

These smaller shops won’t need to carry much inventory, maybe a few demo clubs, a fitting kit plus some wedges and putters they can put on the shelf. From there, Vice will custom build orders in its Germany facility.

“We’ve done OK on our own with e-comm,” Pfister explains. “When we met with retailers last year about our clubs, we had to tell them that we wouldn’t be able to service them right away from an operational and logistical standpoint. They understood that we had to ramp up our capabilities.”

As of today, all systems are go.

The custom-built route fits well with the direction golf retail is going, anyway. Nearly every OEM we’ve spoken with this winter tells us retail stock orders are down while custom orders are way up. Retailers are keeping their inventories low. The days of “one-on-the-rack, 10-in-the-back” appear to be waning.

What’s next? Metalwoods and sunshine

Vice Golf is German but it takes Roman emperor Hadrian’s approach to company building: “Brick by brick, my fellow citizens. Brick by brick.”

Two more important bricks go in the wall this month. Vice will be a first-time exhibitor at the PGA Show in Orlando where it will launch its first line of metalwoods.

Vice Golf has officially grown up.

“For 10 years, we were cutting out the middleman,” says Pfister. “But now, especially with our golf clubs, we need retailers. I don’t think you can be a really successful golf company by only being DTC.”

Companies such as Sub 70 might dispute that but it depends on your definition of “really successful.” Vice clearly has ambitions of being a mainstream, full-line OEM. To do that, retail is essential to reach those golfers whose motto is If I ain’t tryin’, I ain’t buyin’.

Vice Golf has a U.S. sales manager and a network of about 40 regional sales reps. It’s looking for more and will have the Help Wanted sign up at the PGA Show.

“We’re looking for more reps to get into more green grass accounts and retail stores,” Pfister says. “We need more experts out there and you don’t find experts sitting in your e-commerce office.”

Most of Vice’s existing sales team are independent reps who carry four or five lines. These are the people you meet at local demo days, retail promo events or regional golf shows. They spend a lot of time staring at their windshield.

“Being a sales rep is one of the most honest jobs out there,” says Pfister. “You drive a lot, you have to be organized and educate yourself and believe in your products. The only way to make money is to make sales. I have huge respect for them.”

We ask again: Why do this?

As I was being escorted out of the PGA TOUR Superstore by that crack security team, my first thought was Vice Golf might be making a grave mistake. It created a nice little business by avoiding retail but that’s when the lights came on.

Little.

If it was just selling golf balls, Vice could easily stay DTC and do quite nicely for itself. But it merged with HIO and got into the club business for a reason and that’s not to stay little.

Vice is staring down the barrel of two business truisms. The first is that organic growth will only get you so far. In simpler terms, that means if you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’ll keep getting what you’ve been getting. Growth is trench warfare and is measured in inches, not miles.

The second truism is that non-organic growth is risky and the risk multiplies exponentially without a sound plan. Vice and HIO first discussed merging back in 2015, but neither company was ready. It took another seven years of growth and planning to close the deal. When Vice Golf launched its clubs last summer, many readers thought the pricing was out of line for a DTC brand. The fact is the plan to go retail was already in motion. When compared to mainstream OEM retail pricing, $870 for game-improvement irons and $1,040 for forged player’s distance irons is, at the very least, intriguing.

Vice Golf goes retail: Final thoughts

As Yogi Berra once said: When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

Vice Golf is nothing if not meticulous. The company, started by two surfers/law students, saw a void and filled it. It made the move to the U.S. and survived a Titleist lawsuit, something not many DTC brands can say. This decision to embrace retail after a decade of cutting out the middleman is curious on the surface but logical in the wider view given the company’s aspirations.

Will it be successful, however, is another question entirely. It’s easy to be skeptical and claim no one’s going to buy Vice over Callaway or TaylorMade. Sure, it’s a different world today but people told Gary Adams the same thing back in 1979 about Wilson and MacGregor. He still went ahead and mortgaged his house for $24,000 and came up with the TaylorMade Pittsburgh Persimmon metal driver.

None of us knows how this will turn out for Vice Golf. It’s facing incredibly stiff competition but it is locked and loaded with what it considers solidly performing equipment with a unique Vice vibe. It doesn’t hurt that Vice has an existing fan base so it’s not a complete unknown.

“The beautiful part for me is retailers having to admit people were walking into their stores asking for our golf balls,” says Pfister. “We’re not big in retail with golf balls. We’re just starting with golf clubs.”

Brick by brick, fellow citizens. Brick by brick.