How Stewart Golf’s £1,200 gamble paid off

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Stewart Golf’s CEO, Mark Stewart, reveals how many dismissed their idea for a new, premium golf trolley. A couple of decades later and their innovation has helped redefine the electric golf trolley market.

National Club Golfer and National Club Golfer magazine

“I really admire what you are doing here, but it won’t work”. That’s what one industry insider told Stewart Golf chief executive Mark Stewart when his company was first starting out. How wrong were they?

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Stewart Golf are now a well known brand in the golf industry. Their sole intention is to design and create the world’s finest golf trolleys.

They are considered a go-to option for many club golfers and it’s sometimes a challenge not to see at least one Stewart trolley rolling around the course. But not everyone was convinced it would or could come to this.

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And despite many people warning him his idea wouldn’t take off, he stuck to his guns and went for it.

Speaking on the Your Golf Podcast, Stewart recalled how very few people believed in their vision at first. “I remember, very, very early on, I won’t name names, but there was somebody from another company in my niche, that basically doorstepped us really early on,” he said.

“They just came to our base when we were in Gloucestershire, and said who they were and everything. Obviously we were so completely naive in the industry. We said ‘yeah, come in, have a look around, we’ll make you a cup of tea’ – same as we would now, to be fair. And he said, really directly, ‘I really admire what you’re doing here, but it won’t work, nobody’s going to pay £1,000 for a golf trolley’.

“This was in the very early 2000s when the average selling price in the electric golf trolley market was something like four or 500 pounds, or something like that. We were starting at £1,200. We were only doing a remote control, and it looked like half golf trolley, half Learjet.”

While others saw risk, the Stewart brand saw opportunity – a gap in the market waiting to be filled.

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“So we were this big, shiny, silver contraption,” Stewart added. “We were a massive outlier in that. And it’s funny because we never thought of it as trying to disrupt anything or anybody else’s dinner. We genuinely thought there was just a gap, because we were looking at what was out there. And at the time, most electric golf trolleys were basically a tubular frame, a car battery and a motor, and that was your product.

“We were looking at it and just saying, there’s not a premium player in this market. There isn’t one. So why can’t we be it? Why can’t it be us? And, yeah, I think it’s that kind of, slightly delusional, entrepreneurial spirit that got us there because we were saying, ‘well, we can do that’. We can make stuff. How hard can that be?”

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HAVE YOUR SAY ON STEWART GOLF TROLLEYS

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About the author

Max Mcvittie

A bit of a late bloomer to the game of golf, Max fell in love with the sport when he attended Saturday coaching sessions down at his local golf club after being inspired by friends and family members.

Max has remained a member of Eden Golf Club in Carlisle for a number of years now as he looks to get his handicap down into single figures. Most of his golfing career has been spent battling a permanent slice off the tee, which has led to some ugly rounds.

Having studied at the University of Sunderland, Max is starting out his dream career in sports journalism. During his time at university, he picked up valuable work experience at Reach PLC, BBC Radio Cumbria and GiveMeSport, whilst also getting work published in the Teesside Live. He also spent time working at a local weekly newspaper, Eskdale and Liddesdale Advertiser, as a general news reporter partially covering some local sport just north of the border in Langholm.

Max has just started his journey with the NCG working as the assistant equipment editor. He looks forwarded to reviewing the latest golf equipment, taking up an interest in reviews when buying his first golf club, a Cleveland RTX wedge.

With his bag not going under too many changes throughout the last few years, Max carries an M3 driver, Titleist GT3 Fairway Wood, M2 hybrid, a set of M2 irons, Callaway Jaws wedges and a TaylorMade Spider putter. And yes, Max is a bit of a self-proclaimed TaylorMade fan boy.

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