Over the last 11 years, PXG has slowly carved out a niche in the lucrative and competitive golf market. Now, it’s embarking on a retail rollout that will find its clubs and apparel in top golf markets around the U.S. and overseas.
At the time, the golf industry was struggling, but Parsons was undeterred and plunged ahead. And he’s now reaping the benefit of a market that is booming thanks to the pandemic — it was one of the only sports available to play during the health crisis — and an influx of younger people to the sport. According to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, a record 45 million Americans played golf in 2023, a 9.6 percent increase from the prior year. In 2019, that number was 34.2 million.
The most recent stores opened in East Bay, Calif., in mid-February, followed by Aoyama in Tokyo on March 15. Both marked new markets for the company. And Monday, a unit will open in Huntington Beach, Calif. So she and her business development manager put together a five-year retail expansion plan targeting locations with strong golf-per-capita numbers that she presented to her husband. His response: “How fast can you open?” she said with a laugh.“The last frontier for us was California,” she said. With two now open, a third unit in the state will open in San Diego by June.
Korea is the third-largest golf market outside of the U.S. and Japan, and golf is considered an elite sport there because it’s a small country and there’s not a lot of land on which to build courses, she said. “It’s about status and luxury.” Menswear still represents a higher percentage of sales but women’s is growing. Renee Parsons said that when apparel launched in 2018, men’s was 90 percent of sales. Today’s it’s 60 percent.