McLaren Golf can make the clubs, but the real test is just starting

Kandi Norris, Justin Rose, Ian Poulter, Michelle Wie-West and Zak Brown at the McLaren Golf launch event.

If Rose contends in majors with McLaren irons in his bright orange bag, it will create the kind of visibility and validation that startup brands dreams of.

Ian Poulter and Michelle Wie West, who are also brand ambassadors and equity holders, feel like a different calculation. Poulter, now on LIV Golf, isn’t playing in majors and isn’t on network television. He’s a recognizable name, but recognition fades when the camera stops following you. Wie West is iconic, genuinely, but she hasn’t been a competitive presence in years. Both signings feel less like performance endorsements and more like additions to McLaren’s social media infrastructure. Reach over relevance. That’s not necessarily wrong for a brand in launch mode, but it puts more weight on Rose’s shoulders than any one player might want to carry.

And then there’s the price.

The $375 per iron cost is real money. A set of seven clubs clears $2,500 before you’ve thought about a fitting or a bag. For a certain kind of golfer, the one who leases a new new luxury SUV every three years and keeps a locker at two or three private clubs, that price isn’t an issue. That player buys them because they’re good and because they’re McLaren. It’s a market that exists and PXG proved it. But PXG also proved something else: that you can’t live there forever.

PXG launched as the maker of some of the most expensive gear in golf at a time when a lot of brands were still licking their wounds from the recession of 2008 and its fallout. It was built around the idea that extraordinary performance commanded extraordinary prices. The clubs were good, the buzz was real, and for several years, the ultra-premium positioning held. Then, quietly, the prices started coming down. Not dramatically, but meaningfully. Today, PXG drivers and irons are priced in line with companies like Callaway, Ping, TaylorMade and Titleist.

Fanboys buy once, but serious golfers buy on performance and value, even when value is relative.

McLaren Golf is at the beginning of that arc right now. The racing faithful will come. The company’s launch event in Miami was filled with beautiful people admiring Formula One cars, sipping champagne and watching splashy videos. They took selfies standing next to those impressive machines, often holding a club. They’ll admire the Series 1 blades, and many will buy the Series 3 irons. That’s the idea of a launch event, but those are not the people who will turn McLaren Golf into a success, thriving, long-term business.

The business is what happens after the launch event is over.

It’s what happens when McLaren needs to fill out those remaining categories. The drivers, the fairway woods, the wedges, the putters. All of those clubs, like the irons that were just released, are going to be compared not just to other premium clubs, but to the expectations set by the name McLaren. Given that name, and the positioning of the brand, golfers are going to want to know if McLaren gear outperforms stuff made by Cobra, Mizuno, and brands that cost less and carry decades of credibility.

McLaren’s clubs are good. The strategy of limited distribution, with direct-to-consumer sales and with sales through premium fitting partners makes sense. The Tour presence with Rose is smart. The ambition to be a 14-club brand is the right ambition.

But the challenge ahead isn’t making great clubs. McLaren can do that. The challenge is becoming a great golf company. One that people think about the way they think about Mizuno or Titleist or Ping, not because of what the name means in auto racing, but because of what it means on the range, in a fitting bay, and out on a course where the only thing that matters is what the ball does when you hit it.

McLaren Golf needs to be known for its clubs, not cars. Achieving that is a long race.

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: McLaren Golf can make golf clubs, but real test is just starting