Hello everyone and thanks for stopping by. I’ve been busy answering emails and hanging out at Golfwrx.com tonight and I thought I would write a post that I probably should have written a long time ago. We get all sorts of emails commenting on our various golf club reviews… how we do it, who does it, where we do it… you get the idea. I saw a few people asking for more information on our process over on Golfwrx.com so I thought I’d fill everyone in on how we do what we do.
As you may or may not know, SirPuttsAlot and I both work in the golf business. We work at different stores in the same city… we’re actually competitors away from the website. When we first started the site a year ago we wanted to create a golf club testing process that could yield quality, non-biased golf club reviews. We don’t have a big testing facility or robots but we do have access to hundreds of golfers on a daily basis. It’s amazing at the feedback we get from customers. They are all very honest, they tell us when they don’t like something and they buy it when they do. We ask the customers lots of questions and try to get as much out of each one as we can. If the club goes out on demo I like to ask the customer where they hit it, how they hit it and in what situations they found the club to be useful. My shop has a hitting net but we have a fairly large demo program that allows consumers the chance to take clubs out to the range and the golf course. SirPuttsAlot’s shop is a bit more advanced… they have simulators and computers to help golfers find the right equipment. We thought this was a good start… my shop has the demo program and SirPuttsAlot’s shop has the technology.
We then wanted to add another aspect to the testing process. We also take all clubs that we test out to the range and let testers hit them. So who are the testers? These people are friends, family, industry people we know and sometimes even the general public. Our pool of testers is fairly large and diverse… there are people of all shapes, sizes and handicaps. We ask for their comments and a rating. The clubs we use here are demos and it’s not unusual for testers to take clubs for a few days and use them.
So we now had the customer input and tester input but most of these people are from the same area. We added a third aspect… comments from customers in other parts of the country. SirPuttsAlot and I have met a lot of golf people over the years. A lot of them have moved on to other parts of the country and we like to touch base with them from time to time. I’ll call a friend who is a professional in another city and ask him/her what members at their course think of a certain club. I ask how it sells, what people like about it and what people don’t like. Most of our industry friends have an idea of how we test clubs already and they will often have a mini-review in their heads when we call. That makes life a bit easier!
So you might be wondering… do SirPuttsAlot and I ever hit the clubs? Yes we do. Do our views and thoughts affect a review? Nope. We like to hit all the clubs we test so we have an idea of what we’re talking about when it comes time to write a review. Put it this way… if we let our own opinions weigh into a review, I probably wouldn’t have given the irons I play (Cleveland TA3’s) only 7/10!
A few other odds and ends about the testing process…
We test stock clubs… clubs with stock shafts and specs. These are clubs that you can find in any golf shop. We want to keep our reviews directed at the average golfer so we test clubs that the average golfer can find.
We’ll usually talk to between 25-50 customers, testers and industry people before we write a review. We like to gather a lot of input before writing a review.
Our reviews are usually written in the same way… an introduction paragraph, a bit about the club and the technology used, a bit about what our testers thought and then the rating and other information. We try to keep them fairly short and to the point.
There is always a lot of information that we don’t include in the review… it would just be too long if we wrote everything. Feel free to drop us an email if you want to know anything more about a certain review. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
There you have it.. my long winded outline of how we test golf clubs and write golf club reviews. No club testing system will ever be perfect… it’s such a personal thing but we hope our system provides our readers with enough information to make informed buying decisions. If we give a club a bad rating it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try it. It means that the majority of the people we talked to didn’t like it.
SirPuttsAlot and I are used to people questioning what we write. We share our thoughts and comments with the world on a daily basis. We put thought into what we write and we do our best to give golfers the best information that we can. Remember that we’re only an email away… feel free to ask us questions about a review or a club. We’re here to help… not to bash golf clubs!