Swag Golf’s headcovers stole the spotlight, but their putters started it all
Swag Golf has several Core putter shapes.
Swag Golf
Almost anyone who is into premium headcovers has likely heard of Swag Golf.
The upstart brand only hit the marketplace in 2018, but thanks to their creative designs and limited edition drops, the company has grown much larger than founder and CEO Nick Venson ever thought possible.
That includes expanding into designing headcovers for licensed brands and private clubs, as well as other swag (pun intended) like hats, shirts, pullovers, hoodies, t-shirts and more.
But the core and the original business idea of Swag wasn’t in the headcover space. It was actually putters that were Venson’s first love.
No one forgets their first love, and Venson wants to bring Swag putters back into the spotlight by showing people how he makes the “perfect putter.”
How to make a perfect putter
“I started really getting into golf when I was a young teenager and was working at the golf course and fell in love with putters,” Venson told GOLF in a recent interview. “I was a good putter for some reason from a very young age and was obsessed with the idea of tinkering with putters, specifically.”
Venson developed an affinity for Scotty Cameron putters and started collecting them and learning how to make money while doing it. Before long he was working for Cameron, running the brand’s second distributorship of high-end and Tour-Only putters, after he dropped out of the University of Iowa in 2005.
But after three-and-a-half years, Venson moved back to the Midwest from California and was introduced to another legendary putter maker, Bob Bettinardi, in Chicago. He worked nine years for Bettinardi. He was originally a distributor but ended up in the production sphere, doing everything from designing to polishing to painting.
“I was passionate about it and I loved it,” Venson said. “It’s like my favorite thing in the world to do.”
Swag’s coveted golf accessories are now available at Saks!
As Venson was working in the industry, technology kept improving and both Bettinardi and Scotty Cameron had access to it. Venson wondered if he could do it better.
“I wanted to make my best version of a putter,” Venson said. “I wanted to machine them from start to finish.”
When you machine a putter from start to finish — instead of head polishing to finish — Venson says it removes the human element. On Tour, players will often ask for a slightly different version of a putter. They want a very subtle tweak, but everything else kept the same.
Even if you’re the best metal worker in the world, it can be hard to get it exactly right when you hand-finish the putter head. But if you use a machine and CNC mill the putter all the way to the end, Venson says you can eliminate some of the randomness.
TaylorMade has a similar philosophy for milling the grinds of Tiger Woods’ irons and wedges so he can trust they are the same with every new set he gets.
“So I had in my head, ‘Hey, I think if I spend a lot of time on the backend, in Solidworks (a 3-D CAD program), 3-D modeling and really engineering a perfect fully machine putter, I now can control every aspect of this,'” Venson said. “But I still wanted them to look like it was hand-polished.
“I wanted to have a perfect putter if you line up 100 of these things in a row, they’re identical.”
Bringing putters out of the shadow
It took Venson and two friends nine months to figure out a model that fit the bill for a fully machined putter. They created a number of extravagant headcovers to go along with the first release.
They launched Swag Golf in April 2018 with an initial drop that sold out in minutes, and Venson saw products going for 20 times the initial price on the secondhand market.
He quickly realized how popular the headcovers were, especially.
“It started off as a putter company, but it is now definitely a brand,” Venson said. “I knew the headcovers were going to be our bread and butter right away once I realized how much people were attracted to them.”
Fueled by mostly limited drops, the headcover business exploded, and after two years, Swag acquired the headcover manufacturer EP and started pumping money into that business. The company started with just 16 people and has now grown to over 100 employees.
In some ways, especially because of the $400 entry-level price point to the putters, Venson admits the company’s headcover business may have overshadowed the putters.
Swag currently offers five shapes of its “Core” model putters, with the silver tour mist-finished “Naked” putters selling for $399 and the black PVD-finished models going for $499. Limited-release designs also become available on their website and often sell out in minutes on drop day.
“A lot of people still think that we were a headcover company first, but the funny thing is that we really started as a putter company,” he said. “It’s still my passion and you know we’re trying to get the putter to be seen.”
One of the ways they’re trying to do that is through exposure on the Tour. Over the years, Swag putters have collected five combined PGA Tour and LPGA Tour victories. Most notably, Nick Hardy won the 2023 Zurich Classic of New Orleans (teaming with Davis Riley) with a Swag blade prototype. Hardy signed on as a brand ambassador for Swag the year prior.
Anna Nordqvist also won the 2021 AIG Women’s Open with the Swag Handsome Too Putter, and the brand recently signed PGA Tour player John Pak as their newest ambassador. NBC broadcaster Smylie Kaufman joined the brand last year.
Venson also said it will be easier than ever to try out a Swag Golf putter because they’ll be carried in retail stores this year for the first time ever.
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