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Posted 19 February 2007 - 11:24 PM
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Audio Part 1
Audio Part 2
Audio Part 3
GolfWRX is proud to have Taylor Made speak in Golfwrx's first 2007 audio chat. We are excited to have
Sean Toulon Vice President and Benoit Vincent, TaylorMade’s Vice President of Research & Development . We are excited to hear what these two dynamic leaders of the golf industry have to say!
Part 1:
0:34 - GolfWRX You’ve also had great current Tour success, can you talk about that?
0:38 - Sean Toulan: Yeah, we have Frank, and I appreciate the comment. For us, we believe that golf is the most aspirational of all sports, and if you’re going to bring innovation to the marketplace like we have as a company, a brand, and a collection of people, that it has to be validated by the best players in the world. Because in the end, Tour players don’t play it for money, they don’t play it for any other reason than one club is going to suit their performance needs whatever that might be. So we concentrated, when we all got back together in 2000, on: you know what, let’s just concentrate on bringing meaningful innovation to the marketplace that’s relevant to the best players in the world that can be tuned fit all players over time. And the reason why we’ve had such great success on Tour is simply we’ve been able to have products that are relevant and resonate with the best players in the world because they perform better.
1:37 - GolfWRX Let me ask you this, how did you get Fred Funk into the Burner?
1:44 - Sean Toulan: (Laughing) Have you seen what Augusta National looks like lately? So, when Fred Funk, comes to us, and when we talk to a player like a Fred Funk, and if you really listen to what Fred Funk says, and really try, not just to hear, but to really understand what he means by it. When he tells you about Augusta National, and how he is not – as good a player as he is, gosh he just won a Champions event by eleven shots - as good a player as he is, he doesn’t feel like he can even be close to being competitive at Augusta National 7600 yards, he wants anything he can to hit a golf ball farther. So, when we look at people that are really so much driven by distance, there’s really only a couple of ways to do that. One is by dialing in launch conditions: What’s your launch angle? What’s your spin rate? Maximize your ball speed in COR zone. Or, do as good a job as you can with that, and let’s take this notion of added horsepower – more speed – so that we can get more ball speed for you and therefore, more distance. He’s interested more in that, than he is anything else. So, if we bring a golf club to Fred Funk that he thinks he can hit ten or fifteen yards farther, believe me, he’s all ears.
3:01 - GolfWRX Sean, can you go into some of the technology, a little more into detail on the effective MOI, inverted cone technology, moveable weight technology, etc.?
3:17 - Sean Toulan: Of course, I’m going to bring Dr. Vincent in on this, he really runs all of our R&D efforts, and really is the guy that is developing all of these technologies. So, I think we’ll talk mostly on MOI and e-MOI, Frank, but you’re free to ask whatever questions you’d like but I know that’s a little bit more of a controversial topic, so I’m going to turn it over to Dr. Vincent here.
3:43 - GolfWRX Okay, wonderful, thank you.
3:45 - Dr. Benoit Vincent: So maybe I’m going to touch just on what Sean said about the technology in the product we recently introduced. When you look at really ball speed as the primary mechanism to achieve distance – I mean, every mile per hour delivers you an additional 2.5 yards, so of course it’s not the only one, because if you have the wrong spin and wrong launch angle, of course you’re going to affect distance. But first and foremost, between a 70mph and an 80mph ball speed guy there is an intrinsic difference right there in distance. So what happened is in center shots, we know the USGA limited it to the maximum COR as we know right now it’s set at thirty, so the velocity in center shots is limited on the face of the product. You have all the means to influence the ball velocity which we do, for example on our Burner where we can make the club lighter, or longer by making it below 300 grams and making it 46 inches we offer the possibility to the golfer to swing easier and to swing faster through the ball and in consequence generate more ball speed and more distance. Besides that, when we look upon the other side, most of us, and we have a lot of statistics that demonstrate that, most of us don’t hit more than 30% the center of the face, 60-70% of the shots are outside the center, and those shots typically are losing anywhere between 7-10 mph ball velocity depending on how far they are from the center of the face. So those up to 10mph ball velocity lost, of course that translates to a 25 yard loss from the fairway. So how can we increase that ball velocity in off center shots, is the core of that discussion. There are pretty much two means that we’ve found so far. One is of course increasing the MOI, and everyone has been talking loudly about that and it’s easy to understand that when you prevent the head from rotating at impact in off center hits, you reduce the amount of energy that is absorbed and then you transmit more ball velocity, okay, More energy from the head to the ball, so you create more ball velocity. So increasing MOI works, and has been working since 1990 when we introduced our first (inaudible) when we had our first metal wood where the MOI was drastically higher than a wood-wood, and of course as we went to 300, 400, and 460cc’s the MOI increased. And recently we made the last jump by doing a design as you can see on the Burner where we extended the length of the club from face to back from typically four inches where most of the heads have been designed so far to 4.8 inches, so just by extending the head length, we’re producing about a thousand more points of MOI that brings us closer to the limit of USGA which is 5900, so our pure MOI is more in the 5000 range. But that’s just one mechanism to increase that ball velocity on off center hits as I just told you. There is a second mechanism, if I want to increase by additional ball velocity, what I do is, I use the face, and I design the face extremely, what we call, forgiving in off-center hits and miss-hits such as it is going to deliver additional ball velocity outside the center face and what you’ll see with our inverted cone is we’ve been generating up to 2-3 mph ball velocity in an inch off center hits. To put our competitors and both side by side in recent increase in moment of inertia, what pretty much all of us have been doing, from 4000-5000 level which is by extending the length of the head as I just described, that added about a mile per hour. In comparison the face is adding about three miles per hour for the same miss-hit. So this combination: this three miles per hour coming from the face plus the one mile per hour ball coming from the MOI, all of that is an additional four miles per hour ball speed in those miss-hits. We decided to call all that benefit, or that effect – eMOI. And what is it? It is how much inertia would you have to use to generate that additional four miles per hour velocity we just created. And you would say, “I know, but some miles just came from some MOI,” but if you had to create the three coming from the face, how much MOI would that be? And we decided to call that overall effect on ball velocity e-MOI and we claim that on our latest Superquad and Burner, it’s above 5800 on both heads. So both our drivers are capable of generating tremendous ball speed in off-center hits and in that manner of course allowing golfers to swing and hit a little bit, everywhere all over the face and still guaranteeing very, very interesting distance compared to the previous generations of product.
9:23 - GolfWRX Okay. I’m sorry?
9:30 - Sean Toulan: Did you get all that Frank?
9:32 - GolfWRX (laughter) Yeah, I did, I’m trying to digest all that, Sean. How does the e-MOI compare between the two new drivers?
9:41 - Sean Toulan: The e-MOI on the Burner is higher than the e-MOI of the Superquad. Yeah, sorry Tom Oh’s, giving me some coaching on the side here. The e-MOI is capped at 5900, is all we can talk about. So, both of those golf clubs are going to get us to that e-MOI limit set by the USGA, is actually the correct answer.
10:14 - GolfWRX Okay, gotcha. Now, I want to go back to the Superfast Technology where you guys are using a 46 inch shafts on your drivers. How does that affect the control with the players that are using right now?
10:30 - Sean Toulan: Yeah, well, it doesn’t affect it very much, thankfully. Which is the reason why we did it Frank. The head, when you look at, it’s a 460cc head, but just the shape of the head as Benoit said is so much stretched out front to back that at address it looks, much, much larger than say an R7 460 might. Secondly, because the e-MOI of the club head is so high, there is very little ball speed drop-off, even on a large miss-hit like say an inch off center, there is almost no loss of ball speed with that. So, we treated that whole concept, because this head is so big in appearance, because the e-MOI is so high, we felt that was an asset we could leverage. So, that’s when we started looking at the club, not just as a combination of a head, a grip, and a shaft, but as a distance producing system. So that if we could take this head, which inspires confidence to a huge degree because of the shaping of it, with a golf club that had a radically different balance to it, and an overall weight of 299 grams, that we could bring this thing together as a system that would produce a lot more distance. So, 46 inches, when we’ve given it to tour players, and on tour, we’ve had tremendous success with it already, and they’re playing it at an inch to an inch and a half longer than a driver that they’ve played in the past and are having no issues with it. In testing with consumers, it’s the same thing. Most people, when you put it down, they don’t even know it’s longer until you tell them.
12:14 - GolfWRX Because of the size of the head?
12:17 - Sean Toulan: Because it just feels balanced and proportioned. You know, if we put a forty-six inch shaft in a Superquad, it’s going to feel like it’s a pretty long club, because it’s going to look like it is. But when you do it to a Burner, just visually, the whole package fits, which is what we really spent a lot of time and design on.
12:35 - GolfWRX I want to talk to you about an intangible Sean. One of the things we here at GolfWRX really enjoy about the TaylorMade products is your design technology. You guys never seem to design a shoe-box on a stick, so to speak. You always seem to design clubs for golfers, for players. Why is that, Sean?
12:59 - Sean Toulan: Well, we have a very simple philosophy, to be a TaylorMade driver, the philosophy we call internally is Total Driver Performance. So Total Driver Performance means there are some things that are very measurable for that. Does it give you optimum ball speed? Does it have the fastest ball speed on miss-hits? So, I’m talking about COR, COR zone, MOI, e-MOI. Those things are very measurable. Does it give you the right launch angle, and does it give you the right spin rate? So, that’s, I would say, is half the equation. The other half, would be, Frank, some things that, I think a lot of golfers I think would say are intangible, or at least a little more difficult to apply metrics to, but they’re actually not. Those are things called sound, feel, and the overall look of the club. So, to be a TaylorMade, not only do you have to have the fastest ball speed, and the right launch angle, and right spin rate, and all of that, but how does it look, how does it sound, and how does it feel? Because when those things go together, if you hit effectively on all of those cylinders, you’re going to have an incredible product. And that’s really where we spend our time.
14:18 - GolfWRX It definitely shows, which kind of leads me into my next transition question, and Sean, I don’t know if this is for you, or for doctor. But where do you see technology going, you’ve got some companies that are building those big, square heads, is it going to be the design of the head? I mean you guys are maxing out COR, you’re maxing out e-MOI, do you see any more experimentation with metals, where is this thing going to go?
14:47 - Sean Toulan: Well, first, it’s going to go a long way form where it is today which is really exciting. I think over the past 6 or 7 years it’s almost been a golden era for innovation in club design and I think a lot of companies will tell you that, “the USGA is doing this,” and “The R&A is doing that and we’re handcuffed.” And honestly, if that’s the attitude of some of our competitors, we don’t think they’re looking hard enough, because there’s all kinds of things you can do. So, without tipping our hand too much, are there other things we can do with materials – yep. Are there things we can do in the overall shape and design - yeah, probably; although, you have to be careful that when you try to solve one problem that you don’t create two or three others. But I think long-term, and something I think that we’re really, really getting involved in, and I think it’s incredibly exciting, is to try to – and this going to sound a little strange – but to try to harness the power of the mind and the power of the body and bring that together in a piece of equipment, because there are things that we can do where you can attach some mental and physical synergies to improve performance in a major, major way. So, we’re knee deep into that stuff right now, and it’s really cool stuff.
Part 2:
0:34 - GolfWRX Exciting! I want to veer into the tour line in the drivers now and talk to you guys about that. Our audience is full of guys and girls, we buy a lot of clubs – there’s a lot of nicknames about us that are floating around. But we love golf clubs, we love to buy them, we love to sell them, we buy them from retailers, we buy tour clubs, we do it all, you know? There’s always different rumors going around, and I was hoping to clear some of that up, especially with the TP line and the Tour stamped line of drivers. Do they come from the same mold? Do you use the same type of titanium for these heads? Are they pretty much all the same from the start?
1:30 - Sean Toulan: Okay, I know there’s a lot of – believe me; we’re on the boards, all of the boards, every day. That means me, and Dr. Vincent, and everybody here in this room. So, let me just say this – that I am so appreciative of the service that these boards have given all of us in the game of golf, and I mean that very, very sincerely. Because for somebody like me, and the guys here in this room, for us to really get an accurate feel of the vibe of what’s going on in the marketplace is incredibly valuable. So, we definitely are on the boards to listen, we’re not on the boards to influence, we’re not on the boards to plant propaganda, we’re just there to listen to what real golfers are talking about with equipment, we’re the same way. The TP thing, I can tell you the TP concept was born because we listen to people like you guys on boards. And that was a very controversial thing, inside the company a few years ago when we launched the R510TP. There were all kinds of things about, gosh, should we talk about the club that Sergio plays isn’t exactly like the club that might be for sale in the public. To me, I’ve seen Sergio’s club, and I’m a pretty nice golfer, I can’t play Sergio Garcia’s driver, I hit it low, right, and about 180. I’m not going to play with that, but it isn’t so much Sergio’s driver, it’s the specs of Sergio’s driver. So, what we use the tour for is to develop new products, and to develop new technologies, and to validate these new technologies. If we can get Sergio Garcia, Retief Goosen, and Darren Clarke, to give us the two thumbs up, there’s a good chance the average golfer is going to like the idea. So, when we developed TP, TP is tour equipment. Is it the same metal – yes. Is it the same tooling – in most cases yes, and I’ll explain that in a second. Is it made from the same group of foundries and vendors – absolutely yes. So, I know there’s a lot of misinformation out there, when I said it’s the exact same tooling, in some case it is, and in some case it isn’t. What I mean by that is the products that we bring out under TP are the products that are most used on the PGA Tour. For instance, where that would vary is sometimes we do additional TP parts that may not come to the marketplace. When we did the original 510 TP driver, that one went into play and was incredibly successful. But we have players out there, Darren Clarke being one, that would have a hard time leaving a golf club to the right. Way more people hit it to the right and don’t like right and would rather have it left than people know Darren Clarke happens to be one of them. So we did another tool of the R510 TP that had a more heel-ward center of gravity, so for a player like a Darren Clarke, he could have that golf club go more to the left for him. That one we never brought to the marketplace, but we did have some on tour. So, we definitely will continue to prototype, and we’ve always done prototyping on the tour, some of those clubs come to market and some of them don’t. We did an R7 Quad HT, we did a 425 HT, the R7 Quad HT came to market and the R7 425 HT has not come to market. So, we use it, probably no different than Ferrari would use Formula 1 racing, you know, at the very highest level, we get constant feedback, some of that is directly applicable to the marketplace, and some is not so much.
5:35 - GolfWRX Well Sean, I appreciate you clearing that up, you know that’s been a big point of contention on a lot of the boards. You know, is the tour club a magical club, with magical metal in it? The main thing we’d like to know is, if we buy a TP head, and take it to a professional fitter, and we get properly fitted, and it gets tweaked to the way we need it tweaked, are we playing basically the same club as a tour player is playing, basically tweaked to our own likings, do you follow me?
6:12 - Sean Toulan: Yes, and I would say that the only other thing that I would offer up as a difference, and it would not be a difference in the clubhead itself, but it would be the difference that these guys get as soon as they have a PGA Tour card in their wallet, is they get a chance to go in a Tour van and the heads are in there, and they can have them bent to exactly what they like to look at – they could have no hot melt put in it, they could have twenty grams of hot melt put in it – they could take a REAX-TP 75 shaft and tip it four inches and add material to it – they could do things like that that we’re not going to have the ability to do in mass production of TP. So, there’s a spec thing that they have ability to club makers on-site, all day every day. You could get that if you do it yourself, but the tour player has access to that every day.
7:11 - GolfWRX Sean, bouncing back to the Superquad, and the Burner, were either of those drivers designed with either of your ball lines in mind?
7:24 - Sean Toulan: No, they weren’t, and it’s interesting because we have Mike Ferris in the room, who came to us from Spalding and Callaway, and was actually responsible for, remember years ago when there was the System-C and System-T golf balls? One designed for a TaylorMade driver and one designed for a Callaway driver at Spalding? He did it – it was a miserable failure – (laughing) sorry Mike.
7:55 - Mike Ferris: (laughing) Yeah, I’ve had a couple of bad ones.
7:58 - Sean Toulan: But we didn’t really do it here. I’ll tell you what’s really cool though Frank, about the Superquad is because of the moveable weight technology, which means we can change your vertical launch angle now by one and a half degrees, and your spin rate by 600rpm’s, just to be able to play with that and dial it in, aside from your left and right 28 yards of adjustability, but to be able to dial in your launch angle and spin rate by that much, really allows you to make different golf balls work with the same driver which is a pretty interesting concept. That’s been really, really powerful for us – Moveable Weight Technology – as we’ve brought more and more players into our golf ball from their old golf ball whether it’s Titleist, or what ever other golf ball they might have been using, it hasn’t been a difficult transition. One, because they like our ball, but secondly because we’ve got drivers now that we can dial in to make different golf balls perform different ways. So that’s a big advantage there.
9:00 - GolfWRX Let’s talk about the irons, because there’s a big buzz on our forums about the R7’s. Could you explain to me about the differences between the retail R7 TP and the Tour R7 TP?
9:19 - Taylor Made: Sure, there’s isn’t any.
9:21 - GolfWRX Okay, also, I think there’s been some confusion on the launch angles, so there’s no difference in the launch angles, or anything like that between the two clubs?
9:44 - Sean Toulan: No, no, and now Frank, in the past – and we haven’t yet on the R7 TP – in the past, on for instance the RAC LT and the club that was known as the RAC LT II, we’ve done other versions of offset for the tour which we’ve never brought to the marketplace. And again, I think the misnomer is, or misconception is, that tour players don’t like to play with offset irons. The amount of offset that you’ll find in tour players bags I think would shock a lot of people, so we often will do a second rendition of a club, with an additional 2mm of offset, which to date, I don’t even think we’ve started on an R7 TP – wait, I’m getting a head-shake, no we haven’t – so I don’t even know if we’re going to end up going there because we’ve got a lot of people that are showing interest in the regular R7, not the TP version, which is more offset, and a little bit different face profile, so I would say that the only difference there could be between a set of clubs that would be TP and TP Tour, is the TP Tour clubs, if clubs are built in a tour van, they could have a different spec package in the assembly process – heavier, lighter, maybe somebody got on a grinding wheel, you know all that stuff could happen, but we haven’t done anything like that. We have begun development on clubs that will see the light of day in a couple of years, with people like David Toms, and we’ll begin prototyping shortly, but there’s nothing in metal yet, and things like that. If there’s a buzz, you know, maybe it got caused from a little bit of noise around some early, early prototyping, but there is no such thing, really, besides that.
11:46 - GolfWRX Well, you’ve got a big following of the cast R7, on this board, can you discuss any of the technology behind them, and the reason why they are cast instead of forged?
11:57 - Sean Toulan: Sure, I’m going to bring Dr. Vincent back in for this, come on back in doctor.
12:02 - GolfWRX Wonderful.
12:03 - Dr. Benoit Vincent:: Since we introduced the R7, we studied feel coming from irons with the introduction of the RAC iron, initially in the 2000 and the RAC wedges later on. What we discovered is the feel that is really the major reason why a lot of players are electing to use a forged iron over a cast iron – that has been the major argument – “Oh, it doesn’t feel the same.” What we figured out is that the material does very little to deliver you the feel that you’re looking for versus the shape and the way you’re organizing the material on the product. Typically if you look at our RAC wedges, we have these two pockets on the back that are cut out, in I would say a massive piece of metal a blade like product. By carving out those pockets, we’re generating a very soft feel, even if those irons are cast, so when you apply the same thinking process to the iron, we discovered it’s the same thing. If you want to deliver outstanding feel, you have to design and understand how the energy is channeled through all the parts of the head at impact, how the head is going to move, and vibrate, and generate this special feel. And I can tell you those subtle variations on the iron head are really delivering very different feel. So, of course, from outside you say, “Oh, you can’t do that with cast,” and it’s surprising for a lot of people, that’s the first question we keep hearing. As long as you understand how to carve out the material, dispose it here and there, in order to manage the feel, regardless almost which grade of steel you use, you can always deliver an outstanding feel to the product. So we do not think that there is any limitation or negative aspect of using cast, even for an R7 TP or a wedge.
14:15 - Sean Toulan: Yeah, Frank, what I would add to that is, because the construction of our cast iron, and the technology we have been able to develop over the years on the techniques to cast irons over the years especially with now, very, very thin faces, you now have some true and very meaningful performance benefits we can get out of cast that is way more difficult, if not impossible, to get out of forged. So, one of the reasons why so many people have really enjoyed the new irons – R7 CGB Max, R7 TP, and the R7 iron – is because the faces are so thin, cast, but so thin, that we’re getting now, way more ball speed off it, and because we’ve used inverted cone in the back, which we couldn’t really do with a forging, we’ve been able to spread this area of fast ball speed over a greater part of the face, so you’re going to hear things like, “Gosh, I’m hitting these things farther, but I’m also finding that when I miss-hit it, I’m not losing anything with it.” It’s the same concept of e-MOI we’re getting with the drivers, we’re getting it with irons now, so when you can begin to get the same launch angle, the same spin rate, and the same ball speed on a set of tour style irons like the R7 TP, you’re going to have unbelievable distance control and consistency which is really what great iron play is all about. So, that’s why I think we’re having such great feedback and great early success with this club, because it’s really given the golfer some performance benefits that you’re not going to get with the other things. So, providing we can get the sound and the feel really to what the golfer likes, which is why the badge in the back is really there to help tune the sound and the feel, then we’re going to be able to give that golfer dramatically different performance in a cast than we would be able to offer in a forged.
16:17 - GolfWRX That’s fascinating Sean, because there’s a lot of players online here that are still crazy about forged clubs, and one of the questions I was asked is why is there not a US release for the R7 Forged?
16:32 - Sean Toulan: Yeah, well, that’s a golf club in Japan; forgings still do very, very well. The whole notion as a clubmaker of a forged iron to me conjures up all the romantic thoughts of a guy grinding the clubs and shaping them just right, and I love all of that because first and foremost at TaylorMade, we are clubmakers and we haven’t lost sight of that. But, if we really, really believe that our technology with this new method is better, then what we try to do here at TaylorMade, I think the reason why we’ve been successful is we’ve been able to create synergies behind the combination of authenticity with innovation. So, that tweaks people sometimes one way or the other, but honestly, we’ve got to be who we are, and if that means we’re going to lose a little bit here or there – we’re not in this to sell every golf club in the US. We want to be true to who and what we are, and the R7 TP right now feels like we can bring really, really good performance in a little bit different package, but if the performance is better, we think overtime we can change people’s minds.
17:49 - GolfWRX I agree, we still have some hardcore diehards on the board, and just out of curiosity, from a business point of view, what do you consider a successful club launch? If you were to consider releasing the R7 forged in the United States, how many units would you guys normally look to, or need to sell to make this a successful club launch: fifty thousand units, a hundred, ten thousand units? Do you guys have a number in mind?
18:18 - Sean Toulan: That’s an interesting question, I wouldn’t say for us, with a forged club, we wouldn’t look at it as being successful based on sales, we would look at it: is it successful positioning the brand a certain way? And is it moving us forward in this search for continual improvement and better performance? So, if we felt it could do that, honestly, I wouldn’t care if we sold any of them because in the end, and I don’t mean for this to sound arrogant or cocky, but gosh, we’re going to do over a billion dollars in sales – a billion one or two, or whatever the number’s going to be and make plenty of profits and we have a nice business here – so honestly to chase 10,000 sets of irons, it’s not worth it to us if it doesn’t fit in the long term branding strategy.
19:14 - GolfWRX So, if I understand you correctly, there is no goal to release the R7 forged in the United States?
19:22 - Sean Toulan: There is none.
19:25 - GolfWRX Okay, let me just throw this your way, because the 300 iron was a huge success amongst us better players. Have you guys ever thought about bringing that back in a limited TP version?
19:39 - Sean Toulan: We’ve talked about it actually, it’s an interesting product and I don’t know that we ever would. I don’t know, we’ve done some things in the past where we’ve done different forgings or we brought back a retro tour spoon years ago which was interesting. I don’t know that we would or wouldn’t. So, if everybody thinks we should, just have them send me an e-mail. When it gets to thirty thousand e-mails we’ll build a set.
20:17 - GolfWRX You guys never cease to amaze me, even your marketing is ingenious, you guys come up with the name Burner which is a name that a lot of us are very familiar with and you guys bring it back, it’s just an interesting marketing strategy. We’re interested to hear how that works for you?
20:33 - Sean Toulan: Well, so far, all of the early results are so positive and believe me, there was lots of consternation about: should we bring Burner back, what do people remember it as, you know, does that mean it’s copper, does it have a bubble? But what it means to us is it really embodies this new feeling of getting up on the first tee and just hitting a golf ball as far as you can. It’s way younger, it’s more aggressive, it’s very racy, and I just think it’s going to be a lot of fun. And the golf club, on tour, has just done unbelievably well, hey we almost got a win last week with it, I think we finished third and fourth. We had eleven of them in play, nine Superquads in play, so for all the hullabaloo about all these new drivers in play, we got about 20 new drivers in play in about three weeks, versus what some of our competitors are up to with some of their new clubs, that’s a big, big advantage that we have, so the products are performing.
21:38 - GolfWRX Absolutley amazing.
21:39 - Sean Toulan: Yeah, it is, it’s pretty cool.
21:41 - GolfWRX Congrats to you guys, I just want to wrap up the irons and then talk about a couple of other subjects. Going back to the R7 just to wrap up that iron, if you could tweak that iron, even to the point where you could make a minor change in the center of gravity, 1mm; could that 1mm change in center of gravity in the R7 produce any major type of changes in the ball flights, spin rate, etc. Is there any truth to that?
22:11 - Sean Toulan: So, Benoit, if we were to move a CG up or down a millimeter on a 5-iron, let’s say, what would that do to your ball flight?
22:20 - Dr. Benoit Vincent: Typically what you observe is: if you move below 1mm, you are in the noise of the variation, when you start to move a millimeter on the ball flight value up and down, you start to see slight alteration of the launch angle and the spin. Just to give you and idea when I say slight variation, I’m going to give you the difference between one degree, if you take an iron at 27 degree, typically what we can detect is something in the magnitude of 0.5 – 0.7 degree launch angle variation, so about half the launch angle per degree produced, and in spin, we detect about 300 rpm. So, if I’m putting that in perspective of, when you do a small variation of an iron, that’s what you do, so you slightly modify the trajectory and typically if you raise the center of gravity by one millimeter, you would lower the launch angle by anything that would be in-between 0-0.5 degree of launch angle and in-between 0 and 300 rpm. So, now, some golfer would start to see it, and some would have difficulty. We tested the sensitivity to players to the variation of a degree, for example, or a millimeter, that’s what I’m referring to, and it’s interesting that, I would say, 70% of the players that are average handicap can detect it, and I would say that 90% of the good golfer can definitely spot it. So, to answer your question, yeah, it would change slightly, the behavior of the product.
24:07 - GolfWRX Interesting. Just wrapping up the R7, just so for my own edification and the board’s edification, taking all the R7’s, the Tour, the TP, and the retail model, there is no difference between any of the three models, correct?
24:24 - Sean Toulan: Correct.
24:26 - GolfWRX Okay.
24:27 - Sean Toulan: Let me clarify one thing. We have two models, an R7 and an R7 TP, but they’re completely different spec packages, right? One has a lot of offset, and the lofts are a little stronger, and the blades are bigger, and then we have another one called R7 TP, and then we actually have a third one called R7 Draw, so there isn’t a tour version of any of those clubs, they’re all the same. Of those three R7 Draw, R7 TP, and R7; the R7 TP and R7 are both on Tour.
25:09 - Dr. Benoit Vincent: If I can interject, I keep hearing this question about is TP real TP, it looks like that’s the question you are asking over and over?
25:20 - GolfWRX Well, I think what we want to know is if we buy the TP version, are we buying the same thing that the Tour players are playing as in the same heads, where we can take those heads and take them to a professional guy that can tweak them, that can bend them, and turn them, add some weight on them, grind them, whatever, get them to the point where they work for us. What we want to know is, are we taking the same head into that equation?
25:47 - Dr. Benoit Vincent: Let me answer that question, not from the marketing side, but from the production side, as I’m also in charge of making every single of those. I can guarantee that the head that are used by our tour department to assemble golf clubs for the tour players are the exact same heads that are used in the production line to assemble the R7 TP iron. They are the exact same. When they run out of inventory in the tour department, they just pick some in the shelf of the commercial department. And it’s the same thing for the Superquad TP; it’s the exact same product. Now, to Sean’s point, they’re going to equip them with an X shaft, and they’re going to bend them one or two degrees here or there, that’s for sure, but that’s a classical fitting aspect and that’s what we offer in custom, through our custom service. So you can get, if you really need an X shaft, very heavy, then you can get it because in stock we wouldn’t put that shaft in.
26:50 Sean Toulan: Hey Frank, I’m going to give you one other variation: we have done R7’s in a satin finish for some tour players. And that one, we haven’t offered for sale. I would even venture to call that one a spec change. How many sets? I don’t know, 25 sets something like that.
Part 3:
0:35 - GolfWRX Wonderful. Let’s talk a little bit more about your marketing. There were a couple of concerns on our website that I wanted to share with you, and I wanted to hear what your response is. “TaylorMade is often criticized for their short product cycles,” can you elaborate on the advantages of the marketing strategy of your company? It just seems to me like you guys are on a mission and once you get something new, you’re going to pop it out and a lot of times we feel like the club hasn’t even gotten a chance to make it to the market before you guys are introducing something else, do you follow what I mean?
1:09 - Sean Toulan: Oh, yeah, absolutely, it’s not the first time we’ve heard this one. Let me answer it from a couple of different things. We don’t do it for marketing reasons. That’s one. I know it causes some consternation and some confusion in the marketplace, and we have to do a better job of managing that part of it. So, for that part of it, I would say, “Guilty as charged.” I would also say that the biggest reason for our success and our sales have gone from under three hundred million in 2000 to over a billion last year, has been because in 2000, we committed to a model called Relentless Innovation, that when we were ready to bring out a new product that was different, where the innovation was meaningful, and relevant, especially to the best golfers in the world, we were going to bring it out. Since we’ve done that, our business has absolutely exploded, I think the thing that is interesting is that when golfers go into a golf shop, the next time somebody goes into a shop and I overhear them asking for something that’s old, it will be the first time. And I don’t mean to be facetious with that, or flippant, but golfers for the most part, want new. And if we’ve got something that we’ve been developing because we have a very robust, extremely competent, best in the world R&D deparSean Toulanent, supply chain, marketing, the whole thing, that we have a product development machine here that is really, really running hard, it’s running fast, and it’s running well. And if we have something that’s ready to go that gives us meaningful differences in performance, we believe, not only that we should bring it out, we think it’s our obligation to bring it out, it’s just how we’re wired. So, what we haven’t done a very good job of is cleaning out old inventory in the marketplace as fast as we should, and that’s something that we’re launching major initiatives against to make sure that we clean up the field as faster so it’s less confusing. The interesting thing, Frank, is our competitors now, are trying to emulate our model, and it’s interesting, and the dangerous part of that is you need to bring out product that is different and is a major improvement over the old stuff otherwise the model is going to fail and I’m not sure all of our competitors really understand what that model is really all about, so we have a lot of products getting launched in the marketplace by a lot of companies right now at a pretty alarming rate. So, I think it’s going to be challenging for everybody.
4:10 - GolfWRX Interesting. Talk to us about your relationship with Fujikura. How’s that working with them on the shafts, and what do you guys have in the works with them. I know we’ve talked so much about the heads and all your great achievements and about how wonderful these heads are with the e-MOI and all that stuff, but the big buzz now is you’ve got to have the right shaft. You guys have had a wonderful relationship in the past with Fujikura, how’s it going, and what do you guys have in the works with them?
4:42 - Sean Toulan: Well, we have a lot of concepts in the works with Fuji, and, again without tipping our hand too much, I will tell you that we believe whole heartedly in the creation of a golf club, not a head, not a shaft, not a grip, but a club. So, we’re working with Fuji, and other vendors as well not just Fujikura, but Fuji is a company that’s kind of near and dear to our heart because we love the quality of their product, but we’re working on development of golf club ideas. Not just shaft, but that’s a total performance of the product itself. That I think we really started when we launched the R7 425 and 460 and launched specifically with the TP-REAX and REAX shafts in the marketplace. That was mostly successful on the PGA Tour, we definitely had some feedback form some tour players that they didn’t like the concept too much because of whatever reason, we can talk about that. But, for the most part, we believe that we could bring about a better product if we designed and developed a product as a club, not just as an assembly of components.
6:00 - GolfWRX Interesting. In our coverage of the PGA Show, we saw pictures of TaylorMade’s new Select-Fit system. Can you describe something about this? What kind of impact you think it will have on consumers, retailers, how it’s going to be used marketing-wise?
6:22 - Sean Toulan: Well, hey, it’s a major part of our strategy to grow our iron business, and our iron business, frankly is on fire. We’ve got a market share right now of about 16% in the US, and the leader is just a few points ahead of us now and it wasn’t that long ago – 3 years ago – when we had 5% and they had 35%, so we believe we’re going to be the number one iron in market share by the end of this season, that’s a big, big deal. Where we haven’t been as strong as we need to is with the green-grass professional, we haven’t really spoke the language they like to speak and that’s really around fitting, and I can tell you to be totally committed to producing the best performance products, it isn’t just the design of the head, the grip, and the shaft, and all those things as they might go together as a club, it’s also making sure that the golfer has access to the right spec package. So, we’ve been behind and we’ve known that, but we didn’t want to just put out another 3,000 fitting carts, like some of our competitors have, because we think we’re too late to the game there. We felt like we needed to make an innovative step change and bring a process to the marketplace that would move our customer and the end user in a pretty dramatic way. The options that we get with Select-Fit are incredible. We spent a lot of time in development of that, and we’re really, really excited about the buzz around the product line and the initial launch. So they’re going out to the marketplace as we speak, and off of those Select-Fit systems the orders are flowing in at a pretty heavy rate right now.
8:00 - GolfWRX Who’s getting them? Are the retailers getting them? The custom fit guys getting them?
8:07 - Sean Toulan: All of our customers have access to it.
8:11 - GolfWRX Okay, fantastic. So, you’ve got that in the system, and then for putting, can you get into that as well for me?
8:17 - Sean Toulan: Sure, what kind of questions do you have for me Frank?
8:20 - GolfWRX Well, can you get into the custom fitting with your MATT lab and the effect on retail with Tour fitting?
8:32 - Sean Toulan: We’re starting to do more and more launch monitor work with putters, and it’s really fascinating when you see what happens. So, we started really diving into what happens to a golf ball - launch conditions of a putt, if you will, when we developed our MATT system a few years ago. And when you really look and find out what the anatomy of a launch angle of a putt looks like, I would say it’s mind boggling to watch when you start to see the things that really make a putt more effective than one that isn’t, it has everything to do with, I’m going to talk in general terms, high launch and no spin, or, higher launch and forward roll as much as you can. So the parallel between the way a ball would come off a driver and the way a ball would come off a putt, to maximize your performance is a pretty interesting correlation. So, by digging really deeply into what a launch condition looks like for a putt and what we might be able to do to improve that, we developed our insert called AGSI and now AGSI+, and I think for the untrained eye, the average golfer would look at grooves in putters as being all the same. So, without being disparaging to any of our competitors, there are other companies that have grooves on a putter – and we have grooves on a putter, and I can tell you their grooves don’t work anywhere like our grooves. And what I mean by that is grooves on a putter that isn’t a Rossa are fixed, or they are static, so there’s no movement in it. What we have and what makes these things really, really work at a high level, are grooves that are active, is the best word, so what happens in an AGSI+ face versus a putter that has grooves is there’s actually a little bit of movement going on. So, if you know, we have those grooves filled with a polymer, that when a golf ball is actually on the face of that putter, the leading edge of that groove is actually being exposed to the golf ball, and it actually picks the golf ball up and what happens is it creates launch angle even though the putters have not a lot of loft, about 2.5 degrees, it will give us a launch angle of somewhere just north of 3 degrees, but it will also begin to create forward roll for almost all golfers. That combination of little bit higher launch with forward roll is magical in what it does to the consistency of a putt and the end result of more putts going in the hole. Other grooves that aren’t active, don’t do that at all. So, what they’ll do, typically, to get you better roll is they’ll have no loft on it which crams the ball into the ground and creates a lot of bounce – it’s not good. For a putter that doesn’t have grooves, that has four degrees of loft, creates launch angle, which means when the ball lands, it’s bouncing – and when it’s bouncing and skidding, it’s out of control. So, we decided in 2000 that this company was going to become the best performance golf brand in the world. And what that meant to us Frank, is that we had to have the best driver, we had to have the best three wood, we had to have the best performance hybrid, we had to have the best players iron, we had to have the best cavity back iron for the average golfer, we had to have the best wedge, we had to have the best three piece high performance urethane golf ball, and we had to have the best putter. I honestly believe right now, we have all of that.
12:30 - GolfWRX That is extremely exciting.
12:34 - Sean Toulan: It is, it’s cool stuff.
12:37 - GolfWRX This is awesome. Could you explain to me what your goals are to expand the MATT facilities?
12:42 - Sean Toulan: To expand the MATT facilities?
12:46 - GolfWRX Yeah.
12:48 - Sean Toulan: Yeah, that’s a great question. They’re really expensive just to put those babies in. The experience that we can give a golfer that’s fortunate enough to get into one of the MATT facilities now is great. So, we have two things that we’re developing. One is TaylorMade Performance Labs where we’ve partnered with an individual who’s putting these in very strategic areas around the world, typically connected to high end golf resorts, so you’ll see more and more of those. And then as we grow, we’re beginning to do a few more of these Kingdoms. We have a Kingdom here in Carlsbad which is a very, very special place for people to come and get fitted, and it’s typically available to our tour players and to our club professionals and some of their guests. We will be expanding that concept, starting probably end of next year, we’ll have a few more of those being developed around the world, and where it goes from there – at this point, we don’t really know.
14:00 - GolfWRX Very good. I want to touch on a couple of other things, I know it’s getting late and I appreciate you guys sacrificing your time. I wanted to talk a little about the ball, your new hybrid, and just a little touch on the fairways. Sean, can you just talk a little about the ball: on the tour, what the differences are between the ball that we should look for if we should switch over to your ball, which one’s going to be more effective for us?
14:30 - Sean Toulan: I’m going to bring in Mike Ferris. Mike came to us with a ball background second to none, he’s really been the guy that’s kind of spearheaded this effort along with Benoit and his team in development, so I’m going to change chairs here and Mike Ferris is going to talk.
14:48 - Mike Ferris: Hey Frank, we’ll forget about the System-C’s and T’s (laughter).
14:55 - GolfWRX Okay, it’s past, it’s all forgotten.
14:58 - Mike Ferris: (Laughter) Can you repeat that one more time?
15:00 – GolfWRX That’s past and that’s all forgotten. Let’s talk about the new and improved TaylorMade ball. Tell us what we should expect between the two different balls, the characteristics?
15:14 – Mike Ferris: Well, the TP Red and Blacks right now, one of the things that’s really interesting about the TP Red and Blacks for any player is the fact that the spin rates off the driver are the same for the two balls. Really, I think one of the things people may not realize is how we fit golf balls for tour players. We actually start fitting golf balls for tour players literally from the short shots backward. Because that’s really where the differences manifest themselves when you’re looking at the two balls. So, we’ll take, for instance, when we take one of our new players like a Retief Goosen, when Dean Snell went out to work with Retief, he was really working with him, he started out with 150 yard shots and worked their way in from 150, 120, 110, all the way around the fringe, and into putting. And that’s really where the skilled players that are out there, can really see the differences. Off the tee, behaviorally they respond virtually the same, virtually the same spin rates; the only difference between the two is that a golfer may see a slightly higher launch angle on the black. So, if you look at the TP Black, it’s got a slightly thicker mantle overall, it has a slightly higher launch angle coming off the face, not more spin, just a higher launch angle overall. And then when you get around the greens, what you’ll find is the TP Blacks, in all the testing we’ve done, will actually spin a little bit more than the Reds, but feel a little bit firmer. So, that’s inherently the differences with the two balls. From an overall success on tour, we went from introducing the ball last year at the Masters; we had literally two wins on the Tour this past year. Since the beginning of this season, we’ve had five wins by five different players. So, that’s been really exciting, and we’ve signed names that are familiar to players out there – your people are familiar with everybody – but people like Retief Goosen, and Darren Clarke, Hale Irwin, Fred Funk, Natalie Gulbis, and Sean O’Hair are the new entries onto the team. When you go to Europe now and you and you look at the European Tour, we have a situation now where I think at last count we have thirty-seven players playing the ball on the European Tour. We’re number two on the Nationwide Tour. So, really, we see that people are finding the merits of the TP balls and they’re moving into it and it’s their livelihood, it’s the only product in a golfer’s bag that they play 24/7.
18:07 – GolfWRX Getting to the Black and Red, what’s the split on Tour between the usage of the ball?
18:11 – Mike Ferris: There is more Red being played on the PGA Tour, but there’s more Black played on the other tours. Nationwide Tour is predominantly Black, so it splits up. Our overall sales rate is about fifty-fifty in the market.
18:29 – GolfWRX Alright, sorry guys, we’re going to wrap this up, any changes down the line to the ball? Are you guys working on making the Black softer or anything like that?
18:38 – Mike Ferris: We’re always working on changes and trying to modify them to improve the overall performance and to actually improve the differentiation between the two products. So, we are working on those elements right now, it’s no different than golf clubs. We have some formulas that we’re working on that we certainly will try out under fire with the tour players to see just how they perform, so we’re in that process right now. That’s one element, the other element we’ve been working on is we still think we can provide tour players with incremental distance and we have some things we’re working on right now where we can find added yardage for them off the tee with the golf ball.
19:23 – GolfWRX Interesting. Now how’s the Maxfli Fire working out? I guess John Daly’s playing it now?
19:33 – Mike Ferris: Yeah, John’s the fireman as we call him. One of the things that’s going to go on, and you’ll see shortly is that the ball that John’s playing right now is a prototype of the one that we’re working on to come to market. And, so when you see that golf ball in the marketplace, it has different properties than the tour balls that are in the marketplace today, the only real – the difference, I shouldn’t say the only real difference – the difference is because it’s a Maxfli product, you will see it at a price / value relationship that’s different than the other balls on the market because it is part of the Maxfli positioning.
20:19 – GolfWRX Very good, guys, it’s been a pleasure talking with you, you’ve allowed us to take a lot of your time.
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Because the differences? Taylor Made says nothing is different. That makes an issue worth nothing here? Why? 
DEFINITELY lookin forward to those. I mean really, is there any better source of information?
