A major American golf retailer, Golfsmith International Holdings, has acquired the rights to the venerable MacGregor Golf brand in the Americas, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Africa. Golfsmith said the 112-year-old brand will further solidify its own proprietary brand of golf products, without any reduction in its premier brands. Asia is not included as the Asian rights to the brand were sold a long time ago.
Golfsmith added that new MacGregor Golf products would become available by spring 2010 on its website and in its own stores in North America. An official of the company said that MacGregor Golf products will also be traded in the U.K. and other parts of Europe through Golfsmith’s international distribution center near London. The office, which also has a call center for sales directly to consumers, already sells Golfsmith’s proprietary products to U.K. retailers through agents. Sales of these products through the London office and through international distributors have represented about 1.7 percent of Golfsmith’s sales in recent years.
Last year, the Irish-based John Ennis left as European manager of MacGregor Golf and shortly afterward, in September, the company’s European subsidiary in London went bankrupt. Peter Stollenwerk, former agent for MacGregor and Greg Norman in Germany and Austria, bought its entire stock and got a license for MacGregor equipment for Continental Europe through his own German-based company, Green Grass Golf. While pointing out that his contract is valid until the end of 2010, Stollenwerk indicated today that he may know more about his future position after talking to Golfsmith at the end of this week.
Golfsmith operates more than 70 golf superstores in the U.S. and Canada, plus a virtual shop. In reporting its results for the first quarter of 2008, which showed a net loss of $5.4 million on lower revenues of $68.8 million, the company said it had $16.4 million that it could borrow under its existing credit facility as of April 4, against $2.2 million a year earlier. It said that it had been able to generate free cash flow during the quarter and to finish the period with a stronger financial position.
MacGregor has gone through many vicissitudes over the past three years. After acquiring the Greg Norman apparel brand from Adidas in 2006, MacGregor Golf was said to be generating annual consolidated sales of about $150 million, of which $55 million came from Greg Norman. The former golf champion from Australia by this name became a minority shareholder in the group at that time. One year later, at the end of 2007, MacGregor went through a recapitalization that saw Norman become chairman, replacing Barry Schneider, who previously owned 60 percent of MacGregor. Two other investment funds raised their own stakes in the company.
At the beginning of this year, Tharanco Lifestyle, a company in New York that owns nearly 20 other apparel brands, took over the Greg Norman Collection from MacGregor. Tharanco has confirmed a European licensing agreement for the collection, excluding Italy and Spain, signed late last year with a British vendor of slot machines for the gambling industry, Severn Under, that formed a company for the purpose together with Tony Wilkinson, former European manager of the Greg Norman Collection. Wilkinson was going to get a license for MacGregor equipment, too, at least for the U.K. and for some other countries, but it didn’t happen. Stollenwerk continues to take care of the German-speaking countries for the Greg Norman collection as a distributor of Severn Under.
