The Manors Golf Rebrand Story, and Jason Day's Vest Sells for $18k
Manors Golf Rebrand: A Strategic Transformation with Luke Davies
Jason Day’s Malbon Golf Vest Goes for $18k
Jason Day's Malbon Championship Vest, which he was asked to remove during the first round of the 2024 Masters Tournament, recently sold for $18,000 USD. The vest, worn during the tournament, was auctioned at the Brighter Days Invitational, with the proceeds benefiting the Brighter Days Foundation, a charity event founded by Day and his wife Ellie to support nonprofits in Central Ohio.
The vest gained significant attention during the Masters, where Day wore it while playing alongside Tiger Woods. On Friday morning, during the continuation of the first round, the vest—with its noticeable branding—disappeared, sparking speculation. Later, Day revealed to a reporter that he was "respectfully" asked to remove it.
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Luke Davies Breaks Down The Manors Golf Rebrand
This feature was written by Luke Davies - Co-Founder at Manors Golf (link for original).
For those unaware, Manors Golf is a British golf fashion brand making significant progress. I got Luke’s permission to share this article with you as I thought it was insightful for those interested in what goes on behind the scenes of a golf fashion business.
Full disclaimer: This is not a paid ad, however, I was a part of their crowdfund.
When to consider a rebrand, and when to stop wasting your time and just do the work.
Personally, the work I've always enjoyed the most at Manors is the storytelling. The marketing, content strategy, the product design, anything that contributes to building your brand. What’s your company actually about? What do you stand for? Who do you stand for, and how can your visual identity communicate that story back to your audience.
However the reality is no business succeeds just because of it’s branding.
But it can be your downfall.
A rebrand demands such a significant investment of time, money and can risk damaging your relationship with your audience. Whilst the temptation to revitalise your brand image with a fresh facelift might loom large, in truth you’re probably way better off investing that time and money in the unglamorous elements - supply chain logistics, operational efficiencies - those that wield the true transformative power on your bottom line.
However, there are moments when change becomes imperative. For us, I can confidently say we’d be out of business by now if we hadn’t embarked on our rebrand with Stink Studios back in 2022.
So here’s a quick recap of why we did it, in the hope this might aid others in their own strategic evaluations.
Launching Manors in 2019, we basked in three years of growth and success before we recognised something had to change. What made our decision that much more difficult was the fact that business was actually going quite well. We were acclaimed as the brand making golf kit cool and bringing golf fashion up to par. We were connecting with an audience and bridging the worlds of golf and streetwear, and thanks to covid, golf was BOOMING!
3 years into running Manors, these were the 5 problems that we could no longer ignore:
Problem Number 1: The Perception Predicament
We’d started to notice a worrying trend in how Manors was being perceived. It was clear that a large portion of our audience didn’t think of us as a golf brand at all, but instead, a golf inspired fashion brand.
Our retailers weren’t golf shops, they were fashion outlets stocking us next to brands like Stussy and Palace, where our competitive edge of being the young disruptor was all but lost.
We never wanted to be just another fashion label. We wanted to create a golf brand. Made for golfers, and made by golfers. But how could we say that when our audience typically weren’t wearing our products on the course?
Problem Number 2: The Product Offering Puzzle
Whilst we succeeded in introducing a stylish alternative to the stale performance focussed golf wardrobe, our products weren’t functional enough to perform for their primary function. Why should golfers have to choose between style and performance? Our products weren’t fixing the problem we had set out to resolve.
Problem Number 3: The Competitive Tide
We weren’t the only lifestyle golf brand that had realised the market needed a shake up. Malbon had a two year head start and were already killing it, but then upstarts like Students Golf, Bogey Boys, Metalwood, Radda, this amazing collective of lifestyle golf brands that all sat between streetwear and golf. What had been original and exciting in 2019 was suddenly starting to feel oversaturated.
And then comes this wave of non-golf, hughstreet giants like Zara, APC and Nike backed Nocta jumping on the golf bandwagon. Golf was every brands flavour of the week. All of sudden the fashion conscious had loads of lifestyle options to hit the course with. The space was crowded and we were losing relevance and running out of cash.
Problem Number 4: The Business Model Maze
The year before we launched our rebrand 80% of our revenue came from B2B wholesale accounts. We were so over reliant on retailers pre-buying into the collection to de-risk production costs that our design process became focussed on what would appease buyers and not our target audience. Often that would result in overcommitting on the size of a collection, because if a collection was too small many wholesalers wouldn’t buy into it.
This was made worse by the industry’s insatiable appetite for newness. We’d spend a year, sometimes longer developing a product we were really proud of, and after just 4 months it was considered as old and getting discounted and we were back developing the next thing. We didn’t have the capacity or finances to stay on the development hamster wheel.
Problem Number 5: The Sign Of Change
So with all of those problems bubbling away beneath the surface, we finally had the sign that it was time for a change.
In 2021 we launched our first hybrid performance collection as part of a collaboration with Adidas. Introducing technical fabrics and combining our streetwear aesthetic with a more contemporary golf silhouette. And the collection was a huge success. Selling over 90% of the collection in the first 4 hours of release.
Suddenly it was painfully obvious that we needed to adapt — shifting into an era of selling more performance based gear. With a respect for the fact that style and personality has always come first for the Manors brand. But we need to progress, winning over new customers and increasing sales, without doing a full 180 on what we represent as a label.
Embracing Transformation:
In the spring of 2023, we wiped our socials clean and set out on a Change Of Course. Relaunching Manors as a technical golf brand. Embarking on an extensive rebranding exercise. First with the incredible team at Sonder & Tell, distilling our brand into it's core message and value proposition through an extensive storybook strategy workshop led by Emily Ames & Alex Ames.
Then we moved onto the visual component, working alongside the award winning Stink Studios. Totally re-designing our visual identity to reflect this change of course and position Manors as a genuine disruptor in the world of performance golf. Shaking up how we traditionally think of performance golf wear with new materials, new silhouettes, integrating our streetwear heritage with performance and personality.
A Year On:
The whole team feel vindicated on our decision. But it’s not just a feeling, the results speak volumes - with an outstanding 859% YoY revenue surge, spearheaded by a monumental shift towards direct-to-consumer sales, marking a drastic shift from wholesale dominance to a D2C-focused strategy, fostering higher margins and stronger customer relationships.
Parting Wisdom:
It took us nearly two years to launch the rebrand and we risked everything we’d built. For Manors, it was the lifeline we needed, but I’d still advise anyone considering a rebrand to proceed with caution. A rebrand should be a strategic business decision. Not fuelled by mere aesthetic fatigue. Remember, it's the behind-the-scenes 'boring stuff' that often holds the power to ignite real transformation.
Words by Luke Davies - Manors Website
I hope you found Luke’s article as interesting as I did. I know there are many golf business professionals subscribed so hopefully, some of you find this useful.
Thanks for reading, David Skilling
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