Josh’s Tips & Tricks: Day Trip To Taylormade HQ

Intro

Hello golfers, welcome to this week’s tips & tricks. I wanted to share with you this week my trip to Taylormade’s European Headquarters in Basingstoke. It was an unreal experience so wanted to show you what I got up to. Take a look at the following video that I put together of all things Taylormade and i’ll run you through what I saw and my favourite parts.

TAYLORMADE HQ – VIDEO

Presentation

So the first part of the day was a presentation on the 2024 product launch. This included all of the new QI10 Drivers, Fairways, Hybrids and Irons. Some crazy research and development goes into these products so finding out about the technology is fascinating. There are genuinely improvements on each product year on year and the products wouldn’t be brought to market if the brands didn’t believe they would help golfers perform better on the course. Knowing the technology withing each of the products helps me as a fitter know how to put the clubs together for each kind of golfer.

Tour Truck

After the presentation we went to the area where the tour truck is loaded. It was a workshop with thousands of shafts, heads, and grips for all of the tour players. This is where most of the clubs get built for some of the best players in the world including Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood. Lots of their used products were just sat there which was pretty cool to see. All of their gloves, hats and personalised golf balls were also ready to be used in the upcoming tournaments. The main guy told us stories about how fussy some of the players are about their equipment showing quite how fine some of the margins are for the best players in the world.

Lunch

My favourite part of any day out is the food. The food was actually quite basic with sandwiches, salads, crips and fruit. It was enough to keep me going and I was ready to move on to the next part of the tour.

Custom Build Workshop

The next part was the most impressive for me. All of the custom fit orders for Europe come through this workshop. There was a huge warehouse with what I can only imagine is thousands, if not millions of Taylormade components. The production line was then a military like operation. From cleaning the clubs, to building them, to packaging them up. They have the capability of producing up to 4,000 clubs per day on a busy day. They were at this number post covid but don’t currently produce quite that many on a daily basis. The equipment they use is very good quality and means that each part of the club build can be done with precision and ease. Over the years Taylormade have had some best rep when it came to the quality of the build. However in recent years and after seeing the quality of the components and how precisely they’re put together I am certain there were be very few issues in the future with their products.

Fitting

To finish the day we observed a fitting and tested out some of the pdoducts. The lad I watched get fit had a driver fit and was comfortably hitting it over 300 yards. He ended up with the standard QI10 head with a Ventus Velocore X-stiff shaft. Most of you will be wondering what that is, basically its the one most of the tour players are using. It’s also a £250 upcharge on the driver so would retail at a staggering £749! I picked up a few extra fitting tips which i’m going to be using in my fittings straight away.

Summary

Overall the experience was amazing and I was very lucky to be invited by Taylormade to go and see what they’re doing. I was invited as I’m a “Master Fitter” for them. Taylormade has always been our biggest hardware brand at Windmill and it’s pretty much the most well known brand in golf. Their products for 2024 are quite amazing and I would highly recommend coming to try them out in a fitting if you want to improve your golf game.

If you would like to know more about the products take a look at their website HERE.

To book a lesson or a custom fit CLICK HERE NOW.

Catch you soon,

Josh