The European arm of Golf USA, the specialist golf retailing franchise, is opening a second store in Germany this month, in Mössingen near Stuttgart, with a view to a broader roll-out in the coming years. The foray is modeled on the expansion achieved by the franchise in the Netherlands, where Golf USA has become an influential and fast-growing off-course retailer. Its sixth Dutch store will open in Breda in November.
Furthermore, Golf USA has a new store in Casablanca, Morocco, which was opened a few months ago but will be fully inaugurated at the end of October. The franchise should therefore end the year with 26 European and African stores, eight of them in Spain and the rest spread among Sweden, Belgium, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Ireland.
Sweden is the only country where Golf USA recently suffered a setback, since its master franchisee there had to close down one of its four stores, but the relationship between the two parties has been restructured to make the remaining stores more profitable.
In the last year the European arm of Golf USA, based in Marbella, has already improved its buying and services by setting up more direct shipments from the Far East to Europe, instead of shipping products from the Far East to the Golf USA office in Omaha, Nebraska, and then to Europe. The increasing scale of the European operation has also enabled it to set up deals with its own partners to source products under its private label, Tour Eagle.
