I spoke with Champ Golf’s CEO Harris MacNeill just after his visit to company factories in Hong Kong, where he also attended the Japan Golf Fair in Tokyo.

I asked him how the show differed from its equivalent in the States. He indicated that the Japanese market is much higher-end and very technically orientated. MacNeill said further that products are presented differently. Overall, he said the show was upbeat, positive, and well attended: a good sign for the second-largest golf market in the world.

Check out our conversation about the industry and the company’s new Slim-Lok spike below.

(Topics in bold with MacNeill’s words beneath)

How trends in golf shoes work

The reality of the shoe business is that there’s probably 35 or so brands that make golf shoes around the world. Ninety percent of the golf shoes are sold by four brands. You’ve really got four people—because every company has somebody at the top—that are driving technology or what is going to be saleable in the industry.

The spikeless craze over the last few years…it’s the chicken or the egg. Ecco does it, so other people follow, and the sales people say people are coming in looking for it. “We’ve gotta have spikeless” … on and on. It goes from 10 percent of the market to probably 30 percent or more very quickly…

What manufacturers are looking for

Manufacturers have challenged us: “What can you do to make a [better] lower profile spike?”

What we did develop…was called the One-Lok…as a technical system it was a snap-in and then twist-out. It works great from an execution and a technical standpoint. The problem is the tolerances were too tight for your average manufacturer. So as a development story, those things happen. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars going down that path and building production tooling…and realizing that’s not what the industry wants.

Developing Slim-Lok

It was probably November of ’13. [We asked] What are all the issues with spikes in the marketplace? If we started completely from scratch, how would we do this? What do people want? They want low-profile: thin spike, thin outsole, lightweight. Also, it has to be user friendly and consumer friendly.

They’re used to using a threaded system…there are probably 25 million pairs of shoes out there like that…but from an industry perspective, there’s so many different fasteners that are there. In reality, there’s six or seven fastening systems that have been out there over the last 20 years.

We wanted to develop a spike where we could satisfy the shoe brands, where we’d make sure there were no returns and there were no issues with it…the reality is, they [brands] want spikes, but they don’t want to have to deal with it, because they’re in the business of selling shoes. The spike has to work, but they don’t want to think about it.

From a consumer standpoint…it’s the same thing.

The project

Let’s go back and re-engineer the standard in the industry, which is our Tri-Lock system. People know that, they recognize it. It works. We took that premise and we did a lot of redesign in terms of the thread configuration, the locking configuration, materials…we probably had 15 people in our company, both here in the U.S. and our Hong Kong office and our China office…between that November time frame and, say, March, we were able to fully develop the system, test the system, and then get commitments from the shoe brands to put them into their shoes starting with production in the summer and release through September first.

We were working in connection with the shoe companies, who were doing the testing and the molding.

We got equal or better torque or retention in the shoe, so the spikes don’t unscrew or pop out, which is critical, as that was the big knock on the lightweight system. We modified the thread, modified the locking mechanism, so you have a physical and audible click as you install it. You hear a click and know it’s seated and you put your wrench in and go “click, click” and it’s installed.

We made the thread so it’s backward compatible with all Tri-Lok and Fast Twist…so it’ll fit every shoe of those systems ever made. Fortunately, a lot of the work we had done previously in One-Lok with materials we were able to transfer into the Slim-Lok. That’s why we were able to get the retention that had been lacking.

From the consumer standpoint, it should be simple: they just want a spike to go in the shoe and then they can go play golf.

How the company tests and develops its products

A lot goes into the modeling, designing, tooling, testing. We have a lot of internal testing programs for mechanical testing and for bonding, pull out, torque, impact, and all those things that you’d experience in real life. Plus we put it on a large group of golfers who actually go out and try to beat the hell out of it.

The Slim-Lok was a good combination of both sides of the world. A lot of the design and concepts came from here, we did a lot of physical testing here, but the sampling, development and toolwork was done in Asia.

We’re developing on a 24-hour cycle. We work on it here. We can send the files over at the end of the day. They work on it over there, send it back. We do a lot of that, so we can really move things along.

Why OEMs don’t make spikes

The reality is for [the OEMs] to go in and design and tool up for themselves, they’d probably actually pay more for the product than if they just buy from us because of the sheer volume that we do.

They’re getting our total focus on traction technology at a great price and they don’t have to think about it. The other thing is we work very closely with the designers. They will send us a concept. They’ll just say, “Here’s what the outsole looks like. Here’s the design idea of the shoe. Where it’s going to be sold. What conditions it’s going to be used in. What are the expectations? What are the price points? Here’s…what we’re looking for. Can you design something?”

We take that from there and we’ll give them a range of designs. Sometimes they’re off-the-shelf designs we already have. Other times, they’re 100 percent custom. Typically the large brands can afford specific tooling, so they’ll do custom.

Collaborative process of shoe design

It’s very collaborative. We’re involved right at the beginning. When a shoe is manufactured, most people don’t think about, in the shoe there’s what we call the receptacle…that’s the…attachment mechanism that’s in the shoe. So they can’t start making shoes without the receptacle…that’s the first thing that happens.

We ship the receptacles to the outsole factory so they can start making outsoles. And those end up going to the assembly line so they can start making the shoe. The very last thing that happens at the assembly plant is they put the spikes on. We’re kind of the bookends.

The recent foray into grips

I looked at grips over 10 years ago. Grips at the time, Golf Pride was still dominant. There were a lot of other players, but they were all low-tech and they were all low price. I could go into the grip business, but I couldn’t make any money at it. And if you can’t offer anything different, why bother?

Fast-forward seven, eight years later: The price points change. There’s room for engineered product and price points we can make money at. The other thing that tied in at the same time was our…global distribution network: 100-plus really fine distributors around the world servicing 120 different countries and they were asking for more products and so this was just a perfect fit.

It took about three years to develop it. I wasn’t going to develop a line of grips that weren’t unique. Something that has technology but has the tradition in it as well. So we came up with four swing models to cover all the price points and technologies and a line of putter grips.