“The best damn golf balls under 20 bucks.” That’s the tagline that accompanies direct-to-consumer upstart Cut Golf’s wares.

What seems at first like an extremely bold claim really isn’t, as co-founder and CEO, Sam Uisprapassorn explains, the company produces the only 4-piece urethane ball that retails for under $20/dozen–in addition to three-piece and two-piece offerings, which technically fall under the “best damn” umbrella.

Thus, in bringing to market a four-piece urethane ball for markedly less than competitors, they are assuredly selling the highest quality and most sophisticated golf ball for under 20 bucks per dozen.

Founded out of Uisprapassorn’s frustration at losing pricey golf balls, Cut Golf is built on the principle that top-quality golf balls don’t have to be expensive.

I spoke with Uisprapassorn and Dennis Chang (co-founder and COO) about the company’s journey, unique value proposition, product offerings, and what’s ahead.

BA: So take me back to the beginning. What’s inspired you to get into the golf ball business?

SU: Well. we’re avid golfers, so golf was a passion first. Other manufacturers have done a great job marketing their great products, but I thought there was room to do something different…to take a simpler approach to how we message our product benefits. But we got started right about the time Nike was exiting the golf equipment market. I was very loyal to Nike golf equipment, maybe to a fault, but I had to start looking for another golf ball. I eventually started looking at the folks in the direct-to-consumer space, and I didn’t see a value proposition in their pricing.

I was actually in the process of learning to hit a cut, and I was losing so many golf balls, that I thought, “There’s no point in this, there has to be a more cost efficient way to get the ball to the consumer.” So we started looking around for the right manufacturing partner, we found one, and then our business was born.

BA: Tell me about R&D and getting from concept to reality…

SU: To start with, we looked at multiple manufacturing options. And it was a process of looking at what the product was…understanding how the product would perform on the course and for a variety of different players.

There were a lot of designs we threw out and a lot of factories that didn’t work for us. We developed a ball that performed very well against “the other guys.” We got a baseline of what it was doing on the TrackMan and what it was doing on the course, so it was something we were confident in taking to market.

BA: Can you talk a little at selling your four-piece ball at the $19.99/dozen price point and how you’re able to do that…

Dennis Chang: Sam and I scrubbed the business model of everything we could in getting the ball from Point A to Point B. We don’t do big dollar spend at the PGA Show or pay tour pros. Ultimately the consumer pays for all of that. We manage our overhead efficiently, and we’ve grown a lot faster than expected.

BA: Can you talk about demand and what the response has been like?

DC: I think the biggest way we’ve been able to drive sustainable growth without spending more money is awesome customer service and a great product. Word of mouth is obviously big for us. We get a lot of referrals. So we think that means that golfers are looking for a high-quality product at a very good value.

BA: How does your value proposition relate to competitors in the direct-to-consumer space?

SU: You can lump all of the competitors together. We have a four-piece urethane ball for $19.95 per dozen. The closest competitor offers a four-piece ball for $24.95, and I think that’s only with a bulk order of five dozen. With us, you don’t need to do a bulk buy to feel the savings.

BA: OK. Run through the golf ball lineup for us.

SU: We have Cut Blue and Cut Gray, which are both on the premium, urethane ball side. Cut Blue is a 90 compression 4-piece construction performance ball. Cut Grey is the softer compression performance ball with a 3-piece construction. Cut White is a 3-piece ball with a Surlyn cover ($14.95/dozen). 2-piece Cut Red is the lowest-compression ball. You can call it a “distance ball.” We’ve been asked to release some matte colors like you’re seeing in the market right now, so we’re deciding on colors. That’ll be $14.95/dozen with a 3-piece Surlyn cover. We’re leaning toward yellow and orange, and those will be out end of spring.

But we stay away from a lot of the golfballspeak. Look at how golf balls are communicated, everyone has some sort of value proposition. We have a no-nonsense approach: It’s core, mantle, urethane cover. If you want to get into dimple counts, we can get into dimple counts…but we don’t claim our golf ball is more dynamic than anyone else’s or that it’s going to fly farther than anyone else’s.

DC: Because there are so many options right now, golf ball preferences are pretty subjective among consumers. And one of the reason we’ve had such great adoption rates is we push for trial sleeves with our sample packs. So at a very low barrier to entry, without making a $20 or $40 investment, you can try our product.

BA: Cool. Anything in the immediate future you’d like the readership to know about?

SU: We have the Cut Golf Club, which will be a middle-spring to end-of-spring launch. Back when we launched, we thought this would be a subscription service, but I knew that we needed some adoption before we could gain traction with any subscription service. We made that decision early on, but we never lost sight of the idea. So, April-or-May timeframe, folks will be able to set up a subscription/auto-ship to say, “I need golf balls every month,” or “I need them every other month.”

BA: So that’ll all be based on customer preference, not on tiers or plans?

SU: Right. We want to make sure we’re still offering top-notch service. We don’t want to be sending a monthly golf ball order to a guy in Fargo, North Dakota, in the middle of winter.

 

Check out Cut Golf on the web at cutgolf.co.