- 14/07/2025
Just when it looks like golf equipment manufacturers have have run out of ideas, a handful of new ideas seem to pop up out of nowhere. Admittedly, some are better than others, but last year has been a particularly good year for fans of innovative golf gear so in this video, Joe Ferguson runs through the five golf gear trends from last year that he thinks are here to stay!
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00:00As an equipment tester, innovation in the golf industry never fails to surprise me. Just when
00:05you think they've invented everything, something new comes out. Now, some of these innovations are
00:10better than others and some stand the test of time. 2024 has been a particularly good year
00:15for innovation, so in this bag, I've got five gear trends that I think are here to stay.
00:22Okay, mini drivers. Now, you might be thinking, that's not a new gear trend, Joe, and you're
00:26probably right. TaylorMade have been making their variations of it for a few years, but what I'm
00:31talking about is it's really picked up momentum in 2024. Players like Mickelson have been using one
00:37for a while. Tommy Fleetwood loves his mini driver. Even Rory McIlroy was testing earlier in the year,
00:42and the two models I've got here are the TaylorMade Burner Copper mini driver, and I've got the new AI
00:47Smoke mini driver from Callaway. Now, they do two quite different things, but they're both
00:52very versatile. Now, a lot of people get confused about what the mini driver is for, and I think
00:57it's very, very player dependent. As a PGA professional, I've started to see a lot of my
01:02peers popping a mini driver in tournaments where things tighten up a little bit as a pure driver
01:08alternative, and some people might think that's not a great idea with a higher handicap. You might want
01:12that extra shaft length to get your speed up, and you might want the extra head size to use as a
01:16driver. Well, in that instance, you can think about it as a large, friendlier three-wood. The footprint's
01:22a lot bigger, which I'll show you in a second. If I put down the TaylorMade mini driver there,
01:27in behind the ball, that feels like double the size of a standard three-wood. Now, both of these models
01:32come in 11.5 and 13.5 degree options, and you can lock them up on the loft sleeve, so you can actually
01:38get them to a pretty standard three-wood loft, and you've just got a tiny bit of extra shaft length,
01:44and you've got that extra mass behind the ball. I think this trend is here to stay. For me,
01:50as a higher speed player, I see it as that driver alternative. I've got mine at 11.5, lofted down
01:56just a fraction, just a shade over 10.5, and on tight holes like this, I find it really, really useful,
02:06a nice penetrating ball flight, and it helps me find a lot more fairways, and I think this is a trend
02:11that's here to stay. Another gear trend that I think is here to stay, in fact, no, I'm going to
02:17go a step further, I think is the future of putters, is lie angle balance. Now, I've got with me here
02:23the Labgolf DF3 putters, and Labgolf are the early adopters of lie angle balance. It's their name,
02:30Lab, L-A-B, lie angle balance. What is a lie angle balance putter, I hear you ask? Well, you might have
02:36heard the term toe, hang, and face balance before. Lie angle balance putters sit with the toe up. If
02:41I don't touch that shaft, and I leave it to orientate itself, see how the toe of the putter
02:45stays up? That is lie angle balanced. If you've seen any of the social media stuff from Labgolf in
02:50their revealer, that orientation allows the club face to stay square to the par throughout the stroke
02:57without any manipulation, and that's something I really, really like. I think in years to come,
03:02people are actively going to wonder why we ever manufactured putters that wanted to actively
03:07rotate away from square to the target. In my head, that doesn't make much sense. Tiger likes it,
03:13but Tiger's a particularly special athlete that I think maybe we shouldn't all necessarily model
03:18ourselves on. For me, it really simplifies things if the putter blade wants to stay square.
03:23So when you're on short putts in particular, assuming you've got the right read and the right
03:27alignment, that putter blade just wants to stay square to the target. It doesn't want to rotate
03:32away from square, and that really helps with your start line. It's something I'm really passionate
03:37about, and I genuinely think that is the future of putting, and that is a gear trend that's here to
03:41stay. Okay, while we are on the putting green, I've got another gear trend for you to do with putting
03:48that I think is here to stay from 2024. Those of you who listened to the Kickpoint Golf Gear podcast
03:54from Golf Monthly will know I've got a bit of a weird fascination with grips, and this is to do with
03:58the putter grips. In my hand, I've got the Golf Pride reverse taper grips. Now, these were released
04:04this year, and to me, it just makes perfect sense. We spend a lot of time with putting technically
04:11trying to remove that bottom hand from the game, trying to slow it down and give it less power over
04:16the stroke, but we've been using grips for years that are either tapering from wider to thinner down
04:22to the bottom end, which tends to give that right hand or the lower hand in your putting stroke more
04:26power, or we're using perfectly parallel grips, which companies like Superstroke have been doing for
04:31some time, which has really, really helped, but Golf Pride this year have engineered a reverse taper grip.
04:36In fact, they've engineered three reverse taper fits. We've got the round, we've got the pistol, and we've
04:41got the flat, and they go the opposite way, as you can imagine. Thinner at the top, and they get thicker
04:47down the bottom, and when you think about it, if we've got something thicker in that bottom hand, most of us
04:52know that thicker grips tend to deactivate hands a little bit, so when we've got something thicker
04:56in the bottom hand, that's got to be good for our stroke. I've tested, obviously these aren't on a
05:01putter, but I've tested these out quite significantly, and I've had some really, really good results, and
05:06I've actually got one on my game of putter at the moment, so I feel like I can talk with some authority
05:10on the topic. It really does quieten down that bottom hand. It's really helping me hit my start lines
05:15more often, and again, I think this is a gear trend that's going to be with us for a long, long time.
05:21So I've come down the fairway here off that lovely Mini Driver t-shirt, one of my other trends, to
05:25talk to you about another trend that I think is here to stay, and that is full face grooves. Now,
05:30we've seen full face grooves for a number of years on wedges, like the tailor-made high-toe wedges,
05:36various Callaway iterations, but not so much on irons, and I think it is something that we really need to
05:44consider. So I've got with me here, the Cleveland Halo XL full face irons. Now, when you first look
05:50at it, it is a visual that takes a little bit of getting used to, but when you dig into it, you dig
05:55into the science and the tech behind it, it makes perfect sense. Firstly, from a spin point of view,
06:01why would you not want to standardize the spin on heel and toe strike? Sometimes if you hit a very
06:06extreme toe strike on an iron and you're hitting no grooves, you're going to get a very strange,
06:11low spinning flight. So why would you not extend those grooves all the way to the edge of the face?
06:16Secondly, we're always looking to save weight in irons. Now, there's not going to be masses of
06:22saving just by milling extra grooves from there to the edge of the club, but there will be some,
06:27and every little milligram you can save in the club head can be redistributed elsewhere to increase
06:32MOI and put the CG where you want it. Now, for me, again, like I've said, it's been in wedges for a
06:38little while, but I don't know why it's not across the board commonplace. When you think about it,
06:43it makes no sense. Why would we ever stop the grooves there? I think sometimes in golf,
06:47we're very much victims of just accepting things how they've always been and not questioning it.
06:52So for me, and I'm just going to hit one away for you here, the full face grooves in irons
07:01is something I think is here to stay. Also, I think it's going to be across the board commonplace in
07:06wedges before too long. Another trend that is 100% here to stay are 3D printed golf clubs.
07:15And Cobra have been leading the way on this front. They've had putters out for a little while.
07:19And what I've got in my hands here is a beautiful Cobra limited 3D printed iron. Now, 3D printing has
07:26been used a lot in prototyping, speeding up the prototyping process and people checking out what
07:31designs they're going to bring to market. But this is really the first consumer available 3D
07:36printed iron. And I've tested this quite extensively and the feel is extraordinary. I'm not going to
07:41get into all of the tech because that's for another video, but basically what Cobra have done here is
07:46they've created a player looking iron with about as much game improvement technology as in any other
07:52club I've ever tried. It's quite extraordinary. And if Bryson DeChambeau is to believe, and this is
07:57quite a terrifying thought, before too long, 3D printers at home, you could be sat there with an idea in
08:03your head watching the golf, head to your garage and you could be prototyping your very own irons
08:08and wedges before too long and have them almost hittable within a day or so, pop a shaft on and
08:12go and test out a new concept down the golf course. Now, that's a terrifying thought for some of my
08:17friends who've got some really wacky ideas, but it's also exciting for the innovation in the golf industry.
08:23And I think that's something to keep an eye on moving forward. And if the feel of these is anything to go by.
08:28Then we're in for a really nice treat in the future with some of these 3D printed golf clubs.
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