Nick Venson Talks Start of Swag Golf with Smylie Kaufman

SportsGrid

Watch Nick Venson Talks Start of Swag Golf with Smylie Kaufman - SportsGrid on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00Started my own little business of putter

00:07flipping in the Scotty Cameron world.

00:10Wait, how old did you start that business?

00:13I was 15 years old, 14, 15 years old.

00:17Stop it.

00:18Yeah, this was 97, right after the Masters.

00:21Putter entrepreneur right at 15 years old.

00:24Yeah, this is pre-eBay, pre-all that stuff.

00:27Golf web classifieds boards.

00:29Stop.

00:30Yeah, I was just like a name on a message board,

00:32but had access to stuff because I worked at a golf course

00:35and started buying and selling trading with guys overseas.

00:37It was crazy.

00:39And that led you to, you know,

00:41like you're probably making a little bit of money doing this,

00:44I imagine, over this period of time

00:46with the resale of Scotty Camerons.

00:49But when did just the design of Scotty's,

00:52just putters in general,

00:53when did that kind of cue up something of,

00:56like, hey, I not only want to sell putters,

00:59maybe my own putters one day.

01:01When did all of that sort of kind of come into view for you, Nick?

01:05So I was like, you know, again, maybe 15 years old.

01:08I was like the go-to guy on the golf team in high school

01:11that everybody wanted.

01:12Hey, can you like fix this putter for me?

01:14Can you make it look nice?

01:15And I was just tinkering in my basement, making stuff for them.

01:18But I was fortunate that at my high school,

01:20we had some 3D modeling and AutoCAD classes.

01:23And so I just thought, why not?

01:25Let's try it.

01:26Let's see.

01:27And that's really how I got into it,

01:28thinking that, hey, I could design something that's really cool.

01:30I could make my own putter.

01:32But never really fully fleshed it out.

01:34It wasn't something that, like, I was driven towards in those early years.

01:37It was just something I was tinkering with

01:38because I happened to be a really good putter,

01:41and I was always interested in, like, what makes somebody a good putter.

01:45So I was working on different neck styles, all this sort of stuff,

01:48just purely tinkering.

01:51Well, you've got a tinkerer that also on the screen,

01:53Charlie Hume down there, he changes putters every month.

01:57But Swag Off, it didn't start overnight.

01:59Like, this just didn't happen.

02:01And I want to just take me through your professional journey

02:05to get to Swag Off when you started in 2018.

02:08Yeah.

02:09So, you know, all through high school, like I said,

02:12I was kind of buying and selling.

02:13I kind of became known as a guy in the Cameron community

02:16that was able to get some really cool stuff

02:18because I had made some contacts overseas.

02:20I was in this Cameron Collectors Yahoo group

02:23that was like the original Scotty Cameron fan club

02:26and was buying and selling underneath my username

02:30and just became a guy that people talked to,

02:35was able to get some cool stuff,

02:37was invited to some of these special events they had,

02:39these Scotty Cameron Appreciation Days,

02:41met Scotty along the way.

02:43And I think that talking to him

02:45and talking to other people in the community,

02:47it became very obvious that I had an eye for it

02:49and could tell, you know, some of the nuances

02:51that other people weren't picking up on.

02:53And I was very fortunate that, you know,

02:56basically halfway through my college career

02:58when I was at the University of Iowa,

03:00I got an opportunity to fly out to California

03:02and talk with this guy, Rand,

03:06who wanted to become the biggest Scotty Cameron distributor

03:08in the country.

03:10Unfortunately, Rand passed a couple of years ago,

03:12but he was like the original real big time

03:17Scotty Cameron distributor.

03:19And I was tasked with running the Art of Putters,

03:22which is the store we opened in West LA,

03:25to sell and basically work with all the high-end collectors

03:29all over the world.

03:31Wow, that's really cool.

03:33And also curious about this too,

03:35because, you know, Scotty Cameron,

03:37this is like the time period that we're talking about.

03:40It's pre-social media.

03:42And I think just the infatuation,

03:44not only that you had, Nick, but that I had,

03:46and Charlie added, so many different golf geeks

03:48around the world.

03:50We fell in love with the brand with Scotty Cameron.

03:53Like, it was cool.

03:55It's what everybody wanted.

03:57What did you pick up from Scotty

03:59and how he was able to create a brand

04:01in a time in which you really weren't able to market it

04:04like you are now?

04:06Yeah, I mean, I think that's the...

04:08I mean, when people ask me,

04:09the thing that I always found most interesting

04:11was the ability for him to basically put a circle T

04:14on anything and make it special, right?

04:17And that doesn't happen overnight.

04:19That's building a brand from the ground up

04:21between PGA Tour usage,

04:23between the limiting of the product that goes out.

04:26Everything he did, he was spot on

04:28to create that culture from a collector's community.

04:32And as a collector of things myself,

04:34I mean, obviously I love putters,

04:36I love the golf space,

04:37but I'm into vintage pinball

04:39and vintage arcade games and watches and other things.

04:41So I'm a collector at heart of everything.

04:43And I kind of dive, you know,

04:45head first into anything I get into.

04:47I always talk about, you know,

04:48there's like the 1% of people in anything.

04:50I don't care if it's fly fishing or pickleball

04:53or golf or cars, whatever it is.

04:54Like there's that 1% of people that just go crazy, right?

04:57And they want it all.

04:58They want the crazy cool stuff.

04:59They want to have something nobody else has.

05:01And I was like that.

05:02And I think that being able to be around

05:04Scotty Cameron putters at that time,

05:06that was like really the heyday

05:08of everybody on tour is using it, right?

05:10I mean, that was like, it was crazy.

05:12If you look through the top 25,

05:14I don't know, maybe it was 18 of the guys

05:16were using a Scotty Cameron at the time.

05:18Yeah, that sounds about right.

05:20And I was definitely one of them when I played on tour.

05:23But at some point, you know, Nick,

05:26you start to, you know,

05:28you're a part of this big distribution center,

05:30but where do you take the next step of, okay,

05:32I want to grow professionally.

05:34I want to do my own thing,

05:35or I want to learn more about putter designs.

05:38And I read that Benton Ardey as well was the stop for you.

05:41Yeah, so after, you know, three and a half years

05:43doing the Scotty Cameron stuff,

05:45I just wanted to move back to Chicago.

05:47It's really the truth.

05:48I'm from Chicago.

05:49I was out in LA, didn't know anybody out there.

05:51I loved LA, but at the same time,

05:53family, friends, everybody's back here.

05:55Decided to move back to Chicago

05:56and wasn't really sure what I was going to do.

05:58And somebody introduced me to Bob Benton Ardey.

06:00And at that time, you know,

06:03I want to say polar opposite,

06:05but in a totally different place

06:06than where Scotty Cameron was in the putter space, right?

06:08And I had a lot of ideas of what I thought could be cool

06:12to make, you know, any at that point,

06:15really any putter brand cool.

06:16I, you know, I had my own ideas.

06:18I had what I thought collectors were looking for

06:20that wasn't being put out in the market.

06:22And Bob and I hit it off and I spent nine years

06:24running all the high-end tour stuff for Benton Ardey.

06:28We were selling to Korea, Japan, US collectors, events,

06:32socials, all this sort of stuff,

06:33and really building out a completely custom program for them.

06:37And even through that time, a lot of ideas,

06:40just like fell on deaf ears,

06:41not because they were bad ideas,

06:43but because it just wasn't maybe what, you know,

06:46those guys wanted to do.

06:47And so I had my little black book of ideas

06:50that I had saved for all these years.

06:52And eventually I just said, I want to do these things.

06:55So I'm going to, there's no better time to do it than now.

06:59And I had a couple of buddies who were pushing me to do it

07:01because they knew I had this idea for swag.

07:04They knew I had this idea

07:05to really do something bold and different.

07:07And they really pushed me to kind of take that leap.

Category

Transcript

Recommended