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.
“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?
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.
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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