When Vice Golf introduced its new irons and wedges this year, there were plenty oh AND ahhh. If nothing else, they have a distinctive look.
Yet another segment of the golfing world reacted with, shall we say, skepticism.
As a result, we have to put some things on the table right away.
First, despite what we’ve seen from various keyboard wizards online, the new line of Vice irons, wedges, and pawls are NO open models with the name and logo of Vice. “It looks like“it’s too far from”same as“or”copy of. Being a cynical consumer is a good thing. Being a serial naysayer trying to sound edgy with no real knowledge or insight to back it up is just embarrassing.
The line between these two, my friends, can be surprisingly thin.
Last year’s merger between Vice Golf and Munich-based club fitting specialist HIO was the touchpoint that got Vice into the equipment game. Vice Golf had the customer base and HIO, because of over 15 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
Vice Golf’s merger with HIO in 2023 gave Vice a wealth of data, knowledge and experience in developing and releasing its own line of golf clubs. Currently, Vice Golf has a 10-person product development team that includes no less than six engineers who focus on club design and golf ball design.
No, Vice does not own its own ball or club factories. However, Golf’s VP of Product, Marco Burger, tells MyGolfSpy that the company owns its own molds for its original models.
“People often do not understand each other. It’s not too difficult and not too expensive to have your own mold,” explains Burger. “I always wonder why people say when a new brand comes along, ‘Yeah, they just use an open mold and put a logo on it.’
“If you want to be successful with your clubs, the cost of a mold for one iron is usually under $1,000, and you’ll need seven of them. It won’t make your company poor.”
This is a key point of differentiation. The biggest direct-to-consumer brands such as Vice Golf and Under 70 have the means to develop and fund original designs. The Hogan/MacGregor/Ram trio is also in that category. New DTC brands like Takomo, Caley and others that offer open mold products are not there yet. Whether they aspire to that status is an open question.
“When you’re working with open molds, you’re super limited in terms of design changes,” Burger says. “You’re even more limited in terms of specifics. 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 Vice Golf/HIO merger created a bit of a design unicorn. HIO, Europe’s largest independent club fitter, has been collecting data since it opened in 2007.
“If you work with golfers on a daily basis, you see a lot of different types of players with different types of swings and different body types,” Burger says. “You’re always looking for the best possible equipment to help them, and you start to see trends.”
With enough data, trends turn into patterns.
“Out of all these millions of shots that 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 fall apart. They hit more fat shots than thin ones and hit it more towards the heel. It is very easy to help them because their profile is so common and so clear.”
HIO’s house brand, Helix, was officially launched in 2017 after several years of association. Burger and business partner Benny Pfister began experimenting with open-mold clubs back in 2012, but they eventually parlayed their insights into a full-line house brand.
“Helix wasn’t profitable at first,” says Burger. “We were small and spent a lot of money on research and development. When we started, customers would check the performance and if it was good, they would try it.
“It was really the performance and data that made Helix a success.”
Vice Golf design atmosphere
Vice Golf likes to talk about his “vibe”. If you like something out of the ordinary with a hint 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,” Burger says. “I think you can capture maybe 80 percent of that market with specific clubs designed for that specific purpose.”
The new Vice offering uses all of HIO’s fitting data, literally millions of shots and tens of millions of data points, to create fixtures that match those golfers’ tendencies.
“We’re not saying it’s true for all types of players, but many end up with a better score compared to other brands,” Burger says. “It’s not because we have better materials or other rocket science technology in our clubs. The reason it’s performing better is because it’s matching better.”
If you are preparing one if-it’s-so-good-why-don’t-tournament-players-play answer, don’t bother. Tournament play can 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 that challenging,” Burger insists. “It must have maximum performance, but within very small ranges for speed and centrifugation. 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 they joined HIO 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 nicer materials and crazier designs,” says Burger. “You can find better suppliers and achieve a better price point for the consumer.”
A 10-person design and engineering team doesn’t hurt.
“We have high-end 3D cutting capabilities, which are absolutely necessary to create your models, along with an understanding of the effects of different materials on performance.”
A big change from Helix to Vice was the freedom to get a little, for lack of a better word, crazy.
“We found a way to work with aluminum to create some crazy looking heads. We researched those things because they weren’t super clear at first. However, the performance we were looking for was clear because we had the data.”
While you can think about the new one Vice golf clubs as part of the same family tree as Helix, it would be a mistake to think of it simply as the Vice logo on a Helix creation. You’ll see similarities because, after all, a golf club should look like a golf club, but Burger insists that Vice started with a completely different approach.
“The Helix has more of a classic look. Vice carries the familiar Vice vibe in terms of styling, graphics and colors.”
It bears repeating: It looks like it doesn’t mean same-as OR copy-e.
Vice Golf: What’s next?
One element that remains to be seen is the overall performance of the new one Vice Golf equipment. There is an ongoing reader test on the MyGolfSpy 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 add to the line early next year with another set of irons, additional putters and a line of metal woods.
Currently, you can get fitted for Vice Golf equipment at Club Champion while some other club builders have head only accounts. However, launching brick-and-mortar retail will be a slow walk. Vice told retailers at the PGA Show last January that they wouldn’t be able to buy or stock their clubs anytime soon.
“We were afraid we wouldn’t be able to increase production,” says Pfister. “We didn’t want to mess around in the market in the first year trying to achieve too much.”
Still think it’s an open mold?
We at MyGolfSpy rail against unfounded marketing claims. That said, some things pass the smell test and some things don’t. that Vice Golf designed its own irons, wedges, and attachments, and owns the molds they’re made into, if you think about it logically.
“If you look at our specs, they’re a far cry from a typical open model you’d find in China,” Burger says. “Key findings in our data helped us find the perfect combination of specs for our target players. It made it clear that we couldn’t work with an open mold.”
We have discussed in detail before some of the Asian manufacturing surpluses. A proprietary, OEM-owned mold in a Chinese foundry, in its second or third year of production, may be farmed out to a secondary or even tertiary foundry and somehow end up as that foundry’s open mold.
This is exactly what happened six years ago. Some alarmed MyGolfSpy readers found a striking similarity between the then-new Lynx Prowler CB forged iron and the older Dynacraft Prophet MB forged iron. Lynx had it in writing that he was using an open mold from the foundry he was using. Dynacraft was left to figure out how its proprietary design and shape went from its foundry to what Lynx was using.
As we alluded to earlier, a healthy amount of cynicism in a consumer is a good thing. However, thoughtless cynicism leads to knee-jerk knee-jerk objections and false “hot takes.”
“Thinking is difficult,” psychologist Carl Jung is often quoted as saying. “That’s why most people judge.”
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