The story behind the first-of-its-kind design

Undoubtedly, the technicians and engineers who design the latest playing equipment are fully capable of getting the job done – and, with every new club, to dazzle your game. But some gears like to go in a very different direction, because disruption isn’t just about breaking things. It’s about being radically better.

The golf equipment industry is loaded with big brains and majors. Aerospace ballistics doctors. Automotive engine designer. Materials scientists from advanced manufacturing. They constitute a vast army of heads, pouring their expertise into a game governed by rules of conformity and rooted in tradition.

Innovation happens constantly, though not always as dramatically or regularly as the ads suggest. Golfers crave the next breakthrough. Manufacturers promise it with every product cycle.

But truly disruptive ideas are rare. They don’t arrive on schedule and can’t be fooled by a marketing blitz. At first glance, they seem to appear out of nowhere, like a hole-in-one, but they spring from hard work, a tolerance for risk, and a willingness to question what others take for granted.

Innovators like Aretera co-founder Alex Dee, whose story you can read below, didn’t just contribute innovative products—they challenged assumptions about how devices should be designed, built, and sold.

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ALEX DEE’S OFFICE it is everywhere and nowhere.

Some days, it’s the beach. Others, it is his bedroom. On this sunny Southern California afternoon, Dee is talking about Vietnamese noodles in a food court in Carlsbad — a far cry from the corporate confines he occupied for a quarter century at one of golf’s most influential shaft manufacturers.

Dressed in jeans and a crisp shirt, Dee, 55, exudes the air of San Diego surfer meets Silicon Valley entrepreneur, with the focused intensity of an engineer and the quiet ease of a boy who lives a few blocks from the ocean. For most of his professional life, Dee worked at Fujikura’s satellite office in Carlsbad, where he helped make the company a market leader in shaft design. His fingerprints were all over the Ventus, the stiff-tipped shaft that dominated after it debuted on the PGA Tour in 2018.

Ventus was innovative. But he also hinted at a broad view of the industry that, over time, increasingly conflicted with Dee’s own views.

“I always felt that when people in the industry talked about increased stability, it was associated with increased stiffness,” he says. “The two were treated as synonyms.”

That’s not how Dee saw it. According to him, the shaft can be flexible and precise. Responsible and reliable. Can be played at no cost to accuracy. As an engineer, he believed there was always more to learn, more ground to break. He was also beginning to feel how success could calcify into orthodoxy, discouraging the very experimentation that produced it.

He wanted to keep pushing. He wasn’t sure he could do it where he was.

At the time, he was also watching his children navigate high school with a fearlessness that made him reconsider his choices. Dee’s son and daughter were both embracing risks in their social and academic lives.

“In most families, it’s the parents who are the role models for the kids,” says Dee. “In my case, it was the opposite. They were both taking great swings. They inspired me to want to take another one.”

In 2023, Dee left Fujikura. In theory, he was retired.

Aretera AO2 bluewood shaft

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In practice, he was waiting for the right idea. It came from Michel de Fontaine, an old friend and former classmate from UC San Diego who had gone on to a career in start-ups. In college, the two were as likely to be dancing volleyball on the beach as to stick their noses in books. They often joked about doing something together — a coffee shop, maybe a taco stand. This time, de Fontaine was serious. They should create a pivot company.

The duo brought in two other golf industry veterans: Chris Elson for sales, Bill Stiles to handle customer relations. The four pooled their savings and founded Aretera, a name derived from the Greek arete, for the pursuit of sustainable excellence.

“I like to describe our team as three guys with nearly 100 years of combined industry experience and a down-to-earth person,” says Dee.

One thing that everyone found reasonable was not having an official headquarters. No brick and mortar space. Just four friends working towards a common goal, without bureaucracy and hierarchy.

Dee has always played golf, but never much. Even with more flexibility in his schedule now, he’s more often on the laptop than on the hook, driven by a straightforward but subversive thesis: Stability and rigidity are not the same. To prove it, he turned to a proprietary carbon fabric and applied it with unusual precision, oriented at a 45-degree angle to resist torque and placed on the inner layers of the shaft. The rest of the shaft is free to flex and respond. Maximum effect. Minimal intervention.

If that sounds like marketing jargon, it’s not Dee jargon. He’s a numbers guy to the core, allergic to claims that can’t be measured.

When Aretera launched, she had no touring presence, advertising budget or endorsement deal. Only four reputations and a first-of-its-kind design. That turned out to be enough. Clubbers and fitters embraced Aretera. Within a year, the company had released the EC1, built for leisurely paced gamers. A second line, the AO2, arrived this winter for more aggressive moves.