When Vice Golf introduced its new irons and wedges this year, there were plenty of oohs and ahhs. If nothing else, they do have a distinctive look.
However, another segment of the golfing world reacted with, shall we say, skepticism.
As a result, we need to get a couple of things on the table right away.
First, despite what we’ve seen from various internet wizards of the keyboard, the new line of Vice irons, wedges and putters are not open models with Vice’s name and logo slapped on them. “Looks like” is a far cry from “same as” or “copy of.” Being a cynical consumer is a good thing. Being a serial naysayer trying to appear edgy with no real knowledge or insight to back it up is just embarrassing.
The line between those two, my friends, can be surprisingly small.
Last year’s merger between Vice Golf and the Munich-based club fitting specialist HIO was the touchpoint that put Vice into the equipment game. Vice Golf had the customer base and HIO, due to its 15-plus years of fitting data, had the know-how.
HIO’s data and experience in developing its own Helix line of golf clubs made the merger possible and the new Vice clubs a reality.
Vice Golf + HIO = Unique golf equipment
The Vice Golf merger with HIO in 2023 provided Vice with plenty of data, know-how and experience in developing and releasing its own line of golf clubs. At present, Vice Golf has a 10-person product development team featuring no fewer than six engineers who focus on club design and golf ball design.
No, Vice does not own its own ball or club head factories. However, Vice Golf Chief Product Officer Marco Burger tells MyGolfSpy the company does own its own molds for its original designs.
“People often don’t have an understanding. It’s not too difficult and not too expensive to have your own mold,” Burger explains. “I always wonder why people say that when a new brand comes in, ‘Yeah, they just use an open mold and put a logo on it.’
“If you want to have success with your clubs, the cost of a mold for an iron is usually below $1,000 and you’ll need seven of them. That won’t make your company poor.”
That’s a key point of differentiation. Larger direct-to-consumer brands such as Vice Golf and Sub 70 have the wherewithal to develop and finance original designs. The Hogan/MacGregor/Ram trio is also in that category. Emerging DTC brands such as Takomo, Caley and others that do offer open mold products clearly aren’t there yet. Whether they aspire to that status is an open question.
“When you work with open molds, you’re super-limited in terms of design changes,” says Burger. “You’re even more limited in terms of specs. If you want your 7-iron to be 10 grams lighter, you can’t do that without changing the mold.”
Data-driven design
We’ve discussed it before but the Vice Golf/HIO merger created a bit of a design unicorn. HIO, Europe’s largest independent club fitter, has been collecting shot data since it opened in 2007.
“If you work with golfers on a daily basis, you see many different kinds of players with different swing types and different body types,” says Burger. “You’re always looking for the best possible equipment to help them and you start to see tendencies.”
With enough data, tendencies turn into patterns.
“Out of all these millions of shots we capture, we found two or three clear patterns,” Burger explains. “It all came from the data. Everyone is looking for distance but, the higher the handicap, the more they tend to slice. They hit more fat shots than thin shots and they hit it more toward the heel. It becomes quite simple to help them because their profile is so common and so clear.”
HIO’s house brand, Helix, was formally launched in 2017 after several years of dabbling. Burger and business partner Benny Pfister started experimenting with open mold clubs as early as 2012 but they eventually leveraged their data into a full-line house brand.
“Helix wasn’t profitable in the beginning,” says Burger. “We were small and we spent a lot of money on research and development. When we launched, customers would check the performance and if it was good, they’d give it a try.
“It was really the performance and the data that made Helix a success.”
The Vice Golf design vibe
Vice Golf loves talking about its “vibe.” If you like something out of the ordinary with a dash of color, Vice might be for you. If you don’t, then Vice definitely isn’t. However, Vice’s “design vibe” is deliberately aimed at what the industry likes to call “the average golfer.”
“The player we’re looking for is between a 10 and 30 handicap, which is probably the biggest range,” says Burger. “I think you can capture maybe 80 percent of that market with specific clubs designed for that specific purpose.”
The new Vice offering leverages all of that HIO fitting data, literally millions of shots and tens of millions of data points, to create gear that matches those golfers’ tendencies.
“We’re not saying it’s true for all player types but many do end up with a better result compared to other brands,” Burger says. “It’s not because we have better materials or the next rocket science technology in our clubs. The reason it’s performing better is that it’s matching better.”
If you’re preparing an if-it’s-so-good-why-don’t-tour-players-play-it response, don’t bother. Tour play may validate a brand in the eyes of consumers but basing what we play on what they play is a fool’s errand for most of us.
“I don’t think designing a club for a tour player is all that challenging,” Burger insists. “It needs to have peak performance but within very tiny ranges for clubhead speed and spin. For our brand, it’s just not worth it. It’s not our target group.”
Aha! moments along the way
Burger and Pfister brought their Helix design experience with them when HIO merged with Vice Golf last year so there weren’t any big surprises during the development process. Everything they did was data-driven, as it was with Helix.
What was different, however, was that they were working with deeper pockets.
“With Vice, you have bigger volumes and bigger opportunities to develop better clubs with fancier materials and crazier designs,” Burger says. “You can find better suppliers and get to a better price point for the consumer.”
A 10-person design and engineering team doesn’t hurt.
“We have high-end 3D cut skills, which are definitely needed to create your own models, along with understanding the effects of different materials on performance.”
One big change from Helix to Vice was the freedom to get a bit, for lack of a better word, crazy.
“We found a way to work with aluminum for our putters to create some crazy-looking heads. We explored those things because they weren’t super-clear at the beginning. The performance we were after, however, was clear because we had the data.”
While you can think of the new Vice Golf clubs as part of the same family tree as Helix, it would be a mistake to think of it as simply the Vice logo on a Helix creation. You’ll see similarities because, after all, a golf club has to look like a golf club, but Burger insists Vice started with a completely different approach.
“Helix has more of a classic look. Vice carries the well-known Vice vibe in terms of shaping, graphics and color.”
It does bear repeating: Looks-like doesn’t mean same-as or copy-of.
Vice Golf: What’s next?
One item that remains to be seen is the overall performance of the new Vice Golf equipment. There’s an ongoing reader test happening on MyGolfSpy’s Community Forum, with our four testers all showing positive results. We are also testing the product line at our headquarters. Vice Golf tells us the company will be adding to the line early next year with another iron set, additional putters and a line of metalwoods.
Currently, you can be fitted for Vice Golf gear at Club Champion while a few other club builders have heads-only accounts. The brick-and-mortar retail launch, however, will be a slow walk. Vice told retailers at the PGA Show last January they wouldn’t be able to buy or stock their clubs any time soon.
“We were afraid we wouldn’t be able to ramp up production,” says Pfister. “We didn’t want to mess up in the market in the very first year by trying to achieve too much.”
Still think it’s an open mold?
We at MyGolfSpy rail against baseless marketing claims. That said, some things pass the sniff test and some things don’t. That Vice Golf has designed its own irons, wedges and putters and owns the molds they were made in does pass, if you think about it logically.
“If you look at our specs, they’re so far away from a typical open model you’ll find in China,” says Burger. “The key findings in our data helped us find the perfect spec combination for our target golfers. That made it clear we couldn’t work with an open mold.”
We’ve discussed in detail before some of the vagaries of Asian manufacturing. A proprietary, OEM-owned mold at one Chinese foundry may, in its second or third year of production, be farmed out to a secondary or even a tertiary foundry and somehow wind up as that foundry’s open mold.
That’s precisely what happened six years ago. Several alert MyGolfSpy readers found a striking resemblance between the then-new Lynx Prowler CB forged iron and the older Dynacraft Prophet MB forged iron. Lynx had in writing that it was using an open mold from the foundry it was using. Dynacraft was left to figure out how its proprietary design and mold went from its foundry to the one Lynx used.
As we alluded to earlier, a healthy amount of cynicism in a consumer is a good thing. Cynicism without thought, however, leads to knee-jerk naysaying and bogus “hot takes.”
“Thinking is hard,” psychologist Carl Jung is often quoted as saying. “That’s why most people judge.”
