Golfsmith’s Course of Action: Focus on Multichannel Commerce

Golfsmith’s Chronology

1967 - Carl Paul, an engineer with the Environmental Protection Agency, starts a business distributing his custom-made golf club components to club repair shops. He and his wife, Barbara, convert their suburban New Jersey home into a makeshift R&D center. Paul trades in his wife’s green stamps for an electric drill, his first clubmaking tool. They collect telephone directories from around the country, circle all club repair shops, and thus devise a mailing list for their first business-to-business catalog, which includes Carl’s hand-drawn pictures of merchandise.