MacGregor Golf, Swing weight

Manufacturing in Action, Source : The Manufacturer US

MacGregor Golf has a feel for the future of the industry and, as Jennifer Monroe learns, is ready for the leaderboard

MacGregor was the name in golf for decades—nearly eight of them to be exact—but a string of different owners resulted in a loss of focus. Today the Albany, GA-based golf club manufacturer is taking a swing at industry standards and working to reestablish its position at the top.

Driving the company in the 21st century is owner Barry Schneider, and his vision is supported by Charlie and Dave Wood, brothers who ran their own successful golf club manufacturing business, Wood Brothers Golf, in Houston during the 1980s. Originally the brothers’ focus was on restoration and repair, but a conversation in 1983 between Dave Wood and a former MacGregor staff player changed everything. “He said to Dave, ‘anybody can fix a club, why don’t you go back and make me a club? All the great clubmakers are dead,’” recalls Charlie Wood. “At the time, all of the great MacGregor Golf people had retired and gotten out of the business.”

By 1984, a Wood Brothers’ club played in the Masters. Two years later, in 1986, they won the PGA championship. In 10 years, Wood Brothers’ clubs won five major championships and more than 100 PGA tournaments, more than anyone else during that time. “We were never a big company, and we had a simple philosophy,” Charlie Wood says, “To make the very best golf club on the planet and get it in the hands of the very best players. After they win, tell everybody all about it. Then you’d better be able to supply and have cohesiveness. Everybody’s got to be willing to work together and stay on the same page. It’s quality first, last, and everything.”

This philosophy is what Dave Wood shared with Schneider when they met in the late 1990s. “He explained how to do the golf business,” Charlie Wood says, “how to make the best product in the world.” Soon after, Dave Wood was designing those products for MacGregor. Charlie joined MacGregor Golf two years ago to create a process to build his brother’s designs.

Schneider’s mandate for his staff is to restore MacGregor Golf. As the second oldest golf company in the world, it had the infrastructure, including 300,000-square-feet of manufacturing space and dedicated employees. It also had Schneider’s obsession with quality. “He’s only interested in making the very finest product,” Charlie Wood says. “He believes in the consumer—that if offered the very finest, they’d love to have it, especially if it is at a reasonable price. Everything is about quality—quality inspection, quality design—and performance oriented.”

What MacGregor Golf lacked was quality training. “We needed to bring the personnel into the process,” Wood says. “We cross-trained them, 100 percent. We had to train people who had been here 30 years and then get them to cross-train others.”

This level of training allows an operator at one station to know exactly what he or she is supposed to be receiving from the preceding station. If something is not up to MacGregor quality standards, in other words, anything short of A1, any operator can pull it from the production line. “Every employee who works in manufacturing is not only an operator, but also a [quality control] inspector,” Wood notes. “That’s not to say we don’t have quality control; we have an entire quality control department to ensure quality from the vendor, during the process, and at final inspection. Every single phase is covered by quality control.”

MacGregor designs its clubs, but relies on vendors for all component parts. This means the company’s standards require all incoming parts to be at A1 standards as well. “Everything that comes into the building has to be A1,” Wood says, “and if not, we have a system in place that makes it A1 before it goes onto the factory floor. Everything that goes out onto the floor is A1.”

Most important of all the MacGregor components are the clubheads, all of which are cold forged, not cast, and are never filled with lead. Casting and the use of lead are standard practices in the industry, but based on the Wood brothers’ experience, not necessary.

“One of the things at Wood Brothers was we would not use lead,” Wood explains. “It is standard in the golf industry that if a club does not make a certain swing rate, to shoot some lead or leaded epoxy into the shaft and all the way down into the head. Lead is a heavy material, but also a dead material; it doesn’t transmit vibration, or feel. So no matter where on the head you hit the ball, it still transmits the same vibration because it’s dead. So we had a mandate that we would not make golf clubs using lead, and that’s something that is not done in the golf industry.”

When Dave Wood became the designer at MacGregor, the mandate went with him. It was up to Charlie to create operations to mass manufacture the new, lead-free designs. “Cold forging is a long, arduous process,” Wood explains. “It takes our vendors 70 days to turn around a PO. Is it more time consuming? Yes. Is it more expensive? Yes. Is it worth it to create a quality product? Yes.”

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