He just wanted a better golf bag for his toddler. Now he’s shaking up the equipment game - The Athletic

Editor’s note: This article is part of The Changemakers series, focusing on the behind-the-scenes executives and people fueling the future growth of their sports.

MASON CITY, Iowa — Two 30-something-year-old dudes set up lawn chairs in a garage on a nice little Friday morning in November. The fridge is stocked with celebratory beers. Their laptops are out, if anybody wants to actually buy high-quality golf bags made specifically for preschoolers.

Tyler Johnson is nervous. He usually is. “Nobody’s actually going to buy any bags,” he keeps telling his buddy, Jared Doerfler, there for moral support. The waitlist was plenty long, but still, “Maybe I’ll sell 50 bags,” he says looking around at the 150 bags in his garage.

10 a.m. hits.

Cha-ching. Cha-ching. Cha-ching.

The Shopify notifications go off rapidly.

Cha-ching. Cha-ching. Cha-ching.

He is not prepared for this. The blue bags are gone in four minutes.

Cha-ching. Cha-ching. Cha-ching.

“What the hell is happening,” Johnson says as he runs around the garage trying to get things in order. The gray bags are sold out in 10. Only pink is left. The waitlist was north of a thousand, but he worked the numbers backward and landed on a conversation rate to sell less than 100. Foolish.

Cha-ching. Cha-ching. Cha-ching.

Within 28 minutes, all 150 bags are sold.

Johnson, 36, is a former University of Northern Iowa golfer turned software salesman living in Mason City with his wife, Jolene, and their two kids, Charlie and Alivia. He’s the son of a golf course superintendent who was the son of a golfer named Birdie, and one day Johnson wanted to take Charlie to the driving range to keep the cycle alive. But Charlie didn’t have a bag, forced to carry around a few loose clubs because the bags on the market just didn’t make sense. To Johnson, they were poorly made and impractical for a toddler. So Johnson created his own. Out of his garage. He designed these adorable 21.5-inch waxed canvas and leather golf bags made specifically for 2- to 5-year-olds in various colors, and he found an approachable price point. And he named it Charlie Golf Co.

Doerfler has to leave early to get out of Johnson’s hair. The Friday beers will have to wait. Johnson has 150 orders to ship by hand. Within a year, he’ll have shipped thousands. By this November, he’ll be faced with the decision to quit his job and commit to Charlie Golf Co. full time, a side hustle becoming a career.

The golf equipment industry was disrupted by a golfer trying to bond with his family. Now, it’s blowing up because of that very thing. Family.

The clock is fast. No need to stress. But Jolene Johnson throws on some shoes and runs out the garage. It’s a big day in the Johnson household. They just got home from a quick family vacation to Duluth, Minn., with the kids. Now a reporter is in their kitchen asking how their little company bootstrapped out of a garage is blowing up less than a year after launch. A charcuterie board is set up with meats and cheeses. Croissants they brought home from Duluth sit in a glass cake display. But far more importantly, it’s Charlie’s first day of preschool.

Even their 2-year-old daughter Alivia could tell the significance, sadly asking, “Char-lee?” as her 4-year-old brother walked away. Tyler didn’t cry, but it was tough. Jolene absolutely did. But now, a few hours later, they’re in the kitchen talking about whether the day will come for Tyler to quit his job and run this toddler golf equipment company full time.

Before he can finish his thoughts, Jolene notices the time on the microwave.

“I’m so sorry,” she jumps in. “I didn’t realize it was 10:53! I need to go get Charlie.”

Three generations of Johnson golfers.

Packing up and shipping out toddler golf bags and clubs. What a world.

Wonder what my Grandpa Birdie would be thinking about all of this right now.

He would be so fired up. pic.twitter.com/LjB4I2knN9

— Tyler Johnson (@tylerjohnson_59) August 10, 2024

Tyler reminds her the clock is ahead. Nonetheless, she leaves and Tyler makes his way out to the home of Charlie Golf: the garage in suburban Iowa that created a new market in the golf space. Currently, more than a thousand bags in various colors are organized throughout the garage, which gets rather warm on summer days like today. A thousand? That would have blown his mind nine months ago. Then came the sellouts. The wait lists. The national attention. Multiple PGA Tour players outfitting their kids in them at the Masters Par 3 contest. The move to selling kids’ clubs, too. Their first Black Friday is quickly approaching like the nexus point in this family’s life that it is. If it goes as they project, Charlie Golf Co. will suddenly be a legitimate force in the golf space and the focus of Tyler’s life. If it doesn’t, well, their lives are still completely fine.

Golf tends to be about family, as is this story. A chunk of the first $5,000 Tyler put into it began with a bond that Tyler’s grandpa Birdie — not nicknamed because of golf, though it fits! — bought for him back in the 1990s that they only found when Birdie died. Birdie taught Johnson’s father, Doug, the beautiful game. Then Doug taught Tyler, cutting down some old clubs, regripping them and gifting them to Tyler as a boy, a tradition he’s maintained with all his grandchildren, giving them either a blue or pink grip once he knows their gender. The tiny clubs he made Charlie and Alivia hang on the garage wall.

Charlie just wants to hang out with his dad. So when they’d go for some father-son time at the driving range, they’d carry Charlie’s little clubs because the bags just didn’t make sense for a kid that size. They were two-strap bags and had a stand, which was impractical. They were not very nicely made. And they all looked the same.

Deep down, Tyler Johnson is a starter. An entrepreneur. The guy coming up with business ideas with his old Northern Iowa golf buddies. He’s also a salesman, currently working as a general manager at an asset tracking company selling RFID tags, but Charlie Golf Co. is not his first startup. This isn’t out of his comfort zone. Well, yes and no.

He began making sketches on the graphic design platform Canva for prototype bags and working with manufacturers, sending prototypes back and forth trying to nail down all the little details. This had to make sense for kids, for families, for golf. The names of those first three bags? The Charlie (blue), the Livvy (pink) and the Birdie (gray).

Golf equipment is a $15 billion industry, constantly growing and evolving while being pushed by technological innovation in the clubs and balls. Even aside from the Goliaths like Callaway, TaylorMade and Titleist, the kids’ golf club market has been dominated by U.S. Kids Golf. And when these massive corporations are involved, you don’t expect a software salesman in Iowa to throw a wrench into those profits.

But it was some simple advice from his friend Jared Doerfler — who runs the Perfect Putt golf business newsletter and launched a boutique putter company called Hanna Golf — that might be the seed for how this worked so well.

“Just tell a story,” Doerfler told his former Northern Iowa golf teammate.

Johnson’s story was family. It was the bond money from Grandpa Birdie. It was using his Twitter account to let people in through photos of Charlie and Tyler in the garage playing with boxes or Tyler having to chase Charlie sprinting around a course with his bag on his back or highlighting all the extra time spent with his own father.

When the first tweet with a link went up in October, it went viral. Eight hundred on the waitlist immediately, all from organic social media marketing. It was up to a thousand by that launch date in November. The first sellout only seemed to increase demand — the next drop of 300 bags sold out in less than 30 minutes again.

“I think there’s something about a story and relating to the people,” Johnson said. “It’s a family, a small family business, there’s a story behind it. They can connect to it. And now, in the social media age, I think that’s extremely important to know who you’re buying from.”

They had no idea what they were doing in those days. Each inventory drop was a chaotic mad dash. Each extra name on the waitlist a jolt to Tyler’s already high anxieties. Anywhere from 300 to 750 bags would arrive on a Friday, and the cavalry drove to Mason City. Tyler would take the day off work. They’d get a babysitter for the kids. Doug usually drove up that Friday. Grandma and both Jolene and Tyler’s aunts came on Saturday. All hands on deck to try to meet demand.

And Tyler insisted on everything feeling personal, because that’s what the root of this company is about. That story takes longer, though. Each shipment must be delivered with a handwritten note. Early on, he’d hand stamp each outgoing shipping box with the Charlie logo, rolling out the ink, stamping one side, laying them all out overnight to dry and then stamping the other side in the morning. There’s no production facility, and until recently, there was not even a tape dispenser. The waitlist grew and grew.

Deep down, Tyler knew that the scarcity helped build demand and intrigue. But his brain doesn’t always work that way. He hated that people had to wait. Plus, each name on a waitlist is a name not guaranteed to still be a customer when the inventory was ready. They got better, preparing boxes more for each shipment and knocking out inefficiencies. But Tyler also doesn’t really know how to stop, balancing a growing company, a full-time job and a family.

“It’s a lot…” he said.

“He’s probably going to be modest about it,” Jolene joked.

Tyler wakes up at 5 a.m. each day and works in the garage for two hours preparing orders. He gets to work around 8 and is there until he comes home for an hour during lunch. Back to work until 4:30 or so — all while he is still thinking about Charlie Golf — before again returning home for dinner with the family and putting the kids to bed. He’s back to the garage working on manufacturing, new designs or new business channels like club embroidery. Some nights he’s so spent he accidentally falls asleep in Charlie’s bed and has to accept that the garage will wait until morning.

He came home from the trip to Duluth to find his dad — who came up for two days to help while he was gone — had handwritten some of the thank you notes. Tyler interpreted that as a message from Doug saying, “I can take this off your plate, you know?”

It just kept growing and growing, but it was the 2024 Masters that might have sent it over the top. First, Jessica Hadwin, the social media star/wife of PGA Tour golfer Adam Hadwin, DMed Tyler and bought one for her daughter, Maddox. She then told Adam Schenk’s wife, Courtney, who bought one too. Then journeyman Peter Malnati won the Valspar Championship to get into the Masters. His agent was an old Northern Iowa golf teammate. He got hooked up, too.

Tyler was hanging at Doerfler’s shop watching the Par 3 Contest — where players often have their wives caddie and kids run around and even take swings — when ESPN cameras cut to Malnati on the driving range. There was Malnati’s son Hatcher running up to his green Charlie Golf Co. bag.

This was suddenly something real.

Mason City is a small, blue-collar town in northern Iowa built on two cement plants and a door factory. It’s not a huge golf hub, with just two courses and not many resources. Yet every Friday morning at Jitters Coffee Bar, you can find the most industrial minds of Mason City trying to take over the world.

“There’s not much entrepreneurship in North Iowa,” Doerfler said, “but most everyone that’s most involved in entrepreneurship is going to cycle through here on that Friday morning.”

So Johnson and Doerfler make sure they are there most weeks to meet and talk business. They played together at UNI and worked at MetalCraft together until Doerfler took his own leap of faith, quitting his job to buy a mill and teach himself how to make hand-crafted putters. Doerfler is the first to tell you how challenging it is. He has moments where he wonders if he’s an idiot for taking this risk, but he loves it.

Lately, many of these meetings are centered around where Johnson should take Charlie Golf, and by extension his career.

He added kids golf clubs in the spring, which immediately took off by staying true to the company’s core principles. He insisted on them being stainless steel clubs that look like real, adult clubs but much lighter than others in the market. “The kids just want something to swing,” he said. “They’re not gonna hit the ball much. It’s not about that. It’s not about launch angles and ball speed. It’s about having a golf club in their hand they can hit a real ball with.” He’s certainly not inventing the wheel with kids clubs, something that’s been around forever and dominated by U.S. Kids Golf, but he’s also developing a strong, family-based brand. If people know Charlie Golf, they know it’s authentic. So if people are searching for toddler golf clubs, maybe the tie goes to the company they feel a connection toward.

His Google Analytics tools tell him more people search for clubs than they do bags, which makes sense. Having a cool bag is additive. Getting your kid into golf certainly starts with the clubs. That may be the future of the company.

Johnson is long past the phase where this is all just a hobby. The next step is figuring out how to make this a sustainable company. The self-sustaining business now projects to reach seven figures in revenue with a good holiday season, Johnson said.

And within that contrast between CEO and normal dad, there are little choices Johnson has to make. Like the price: $88 for a bag.

“I’ve had so many people tell me, ‘You’re not charging enough.’ But it wasn’t about that. In my mind, when I was growing up, there was no way my dad was gonna spend $100 on a 2-5 year old bag. It wasn’t gonna happen. So, ‘OK, what can I do to make this somewhat attractive for all families and not let the money aspect restrict them?’”

Even that price has family meaning. His uncle’s old Iowa dirt track race car number was 88, and at their home course driving range Doug took a side panel from the car and set it up at the 88-yard mark. Johnson spent his whole youth trying to hit three-quarter wedges to 88 yards, bouncing off the panel. When it was time to pick a price for the clubs, he went with $188.

As the market grows, so does the competition that didn’t exist when he started. “Well, you would imagine once people see the success of it…” Johnson joked as he prepares for the reality that those major corporations will begin to sell their own toddler bags.

If this Black Friday is the test for what his company will become, the 2025 Masters might be a little marker for where they stand. Last April was such a moment for the Johnsons, and the hope is to build on it. Can he get the prodigy of the top names in the sport to run past the azaleas with a Charlie bag? Or will the brands that sponsor these star golfers try to use the moment to jump in and outfit the kids in their own merch?

Johnson wrestles with these future challenges while still working another job. He primarily works alone at the company’s Mason City office, making it even easier to get distracted by Charlie Golf.

“I’m on my computer so much, and I have the tabs of the other stuff, checking it periodically,” he said. “It’s hard. It’s very, very challenging. That’s how I know I need to do one or the other.”

So much of this is built on projecting the future for a company there’s no projection for. It’s all new. Each inventory purchase is another risk that maybe people will one day just stop buying. This latest drop was for 1,700 bags. If Johnson used to stress about people on the waitlist not buying, he has shifted that to the stress of not selling out. That’s generally a good thing, as his manufacturing and scale has caught up with the company and now sales are steady and not dependent on chaotic drop days. But he has to walk out to the garage each day and see all these bags that need to be sold.

He knows the numbers better now and knows that the last few months indicate he can support his family with the company. That’s why Black Friday is the big moment. It’s his first real holiday sale season to find out if Charlie Golf is here to stay.

Then maybe he’ll quit his job. Then maybe they’ll expand. Maybe they’ll move into a real facility.

Whatever happens next, he can lean back on this. That it all started with a father and a son in a garage.

The Changemakers series is part of a partnership with Acura.

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(Top photo: Brody Miller / The Athletic)

Brody Miller covers golf and the LSU Tigers for The Athletic. He came to The Athletic from the New Orleans Times-Picayune. A South Jersey native, Miller graduated from Indiana University before going on to stops at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Indianapolis Star, the Clarion Ledger and NOLA.com. Follow Brody on Twitter @BrodyAMiller

Brody Miller@BrodyAMiller