Perfect Putt Staff

New tools haven’t moved golf’s factories. They’ve changed how few clubs it pays to make. A factory making 100,000 identical iron heads spreads its tooling costs across every unit. A workshop making 1,000 different heads has little to spread and gains little from scale. For

Workouts are becoming free. The value in golf fitness sits with whoever the aging golfer trusts, and with whoever owns that golfer’s next ten years of spending. Welcome to Perfect Putt, a newsletter covering the business and economics of the golf industry. If this was forwarded to you, subscribe

Golf has more workers than ever and, by the latest measure, less output per hour than in 2007. Price increases have covered the gap so far. The next margin comes from what operators do with the hours already on the payroll, and scale decides who captures it. Welcome to Perfect

Making a golf product and capturing its economics have become separate businesses. Margin data from the factory floor to the shop counter show who keeps the money, and the 2025–26 tariff cycle showed who absorbs the shocks. A single driver can carry an American brand, a head made by

Content changed how golfers discover instruction without changing where they buy it. Owning the customer relationship lets an instructor monetize that attention; the ability to scale beyond a single instructor determines what the relationship is worth. Welcome to Perfect Putt, a newsletter covering the business and economics of the golf

Golf keeps adding players, but not all of them are worth the same. A lifetime-value model shows how a golfer's economic worth compounds, or evaporates, depending on what happens after the first round. Golf's participation numbers have risen for six straight years. The National Golf

Golf capital creates value through five channels: real estate, membership, hospitality and tourism, licensing, and technology. Which channel captures the return depends largely on who controls the underlying land. Golf courses are expensive to build, and what capital can do with the land underneath it varies by place: buy it

How golf's most recognizable holes turn attention into hospitality, media, merchandise, and pricing power, and where the value actually gets captured. An iconic golf hole does something for a course that ordinary architecture can't. TPC Sawgrass's 17th, a nerve-wracking shot to a green

Caddie programs are expanding beyond the private clubs that sustained them for generations. The operating model behind them has not kept pace. A club can recruit, train, schedule, supervise, and price a caddie's work without technically employing or paying the person doing it. That arrangement has survived largely

Japan’s golf-membership market shows what has to be true for access to behave like a financial asset, what happens when that structure breaks, and which of those conditions exist in the U.S. private-club market today. In February 1990, a membership at Koganei Country Club outside Tokyo