Custom Putter Maker Transforms Blocks Of Wood Into Four-Figure Mallet Masterpieces

‘Conversation-starter’ isn’t exactly the typical superlative used to describe a putter but that’s par for the course for the crazy looking burl wood beauties chiseled by this Grants Pass, Oregon outfit. Bradley Putters, whose workshop is just a few blocks down the street from the headquarters of drive-thru coffee chain Dutch Bros, creates one-of-a-kind flatsticks that often showcase their owners’ passions and proclivities, producing playable homages of everything from Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ to a slice of pepperoni pizza.

Before jumpstarting a career crafting showy flatsticks, Converse’s work tended to go way more under the radar. He spent a decade as an engineer implementing stealth technologies for a defense contractor serving the maritime industry.

When his employer wished to relocate him and his young family from Southern Oregon to Virginia, Converse decided it was time to jump ship. His path from engineer to entrepreneur became illuminated on Black Friday of 2016 while perusing the handcrafted wares at The Real Mother Goose flagship store in downtown Portland. Whittling had long been one of Converse’s hobbies and his father was an avid woodworker who made high-end trinket boxes, so taking a gander at the now online-only crafts gallery had been a longstanding family Christmas tradition.

“There was this real cool looking drum and I pictured a golf ball dropping on it and that was the initial spark,” Converse confesses.

There was a solid piece of wood on top of the percussion instrument with cutouts of different sizes that produced different sounds when struck. The initial idea was a putter with similar cutouts that would make a unique sound when the sweetspot was hit.

“The next day I realized that was a terrible idea,” Converse continues. But in doing the initial research on wood putters, he determined that if he could find a way to engineer them well, there was a market and it was ripe for expansion.

To raise start-up capital so he could get to work sanding the rough edges off his business idea, he and his wife sold their house and moved onto a trailer on his parent’s property. The plan at the time was for Bradley Putters to become the next Scotty Cameron but it didn’t take long for that dream to be recast.

“Pretty quickly I realized with custom wooden putters, the mainstream is going to be an extremely hard nut to break. The average person looking at one of my putters will think they don’t perform well and is not going to spend the time to learn about it. I’m not going to be able to put an ad out during Saturday of the PGA Championship and have people go ‘oh wow, that’s so cool, I’m going to go buy one right away,” Converse explains.

While early brand awareness flubs like employing the talents of an influencer house to generate brand buzz fell flat, Bradley Putters would eventually find their groove.

PuttSkee, a golf meets Skee-Ball novelty product, had extra room at their booth for the 2017 PGA Merchandise Show and Converse seized the opportunity to sublet the space. Passerby took notice, although some were dubious as to the playability of the eye-catching putters until they rolled a few.

“We’ve got a product that is so visually interesting that Instagram has been a piece of cake. Every putter is so unique and different. It’s not like I’m trying to take fifteen different pictures of a golf towel. Every day there is a new putter and I built a community of people who are very interested in what this guy is working on next,” Converse says.

At first, the gorgeous wood used to create the putters was the draw with pretty box elder, maple and olive burl putters wowing golfers. But when early customers reported playing partners were always asking them about the story behind their putter in the same manner people do about the meaning behind a tattoo, Converse decided that his putters should really be helping people tell their own story and so he doubled down on customization.

Bradley Putters begin as solid blocks that are stabilized to plasticize the wood, remove moisture and replace it with a resin that hardens and weatherproofs the putter to make it playable. As burl tends to have voids and is really bumpy on the outside acrylic is often added to create a smoother aesthetic. Internal lead weights are placed to satisfy a client’s performative specifications but the artistic personalization is where the creativity really comes into play.

At the bequest of a recent customer pint sized 3D printed, hand painted rubber duckies gorging on spicy tuna rolls were embedded in a putter head with a pair of chopsticks serving as an alignment aid. Another features a splashy abstract expressionistic top visible at address with the club head’s flipside featuring an engraving of the client’s RV with the backdrop of an autumnal Smoky Mountain scene. As the putters come to life, customers follow along step bystep on Trello, a workflow management tool made by AtlassianTEAM
.

“I want them to feel like they’re looking over my shoulder in the workshop,” Converse explains.

“Once they get it if they don’t roll it well or any reason at all we’ll tweak it till it’s perfect. My advertising is word of mouth and if it just sits in their garage, that doesn’t suit me well. I’d prefer if it is their gamer. That is the goal,” he adds.

The most common question he gets is if the putters are meant to be played or are just art pieces. According to Converse, the answer relates back to the physics of the design.

“I get messages all the time saying ‘this rolls even better than it looks.’ That’s the vibrational dynamic. Wood is low density compared to steel and we add higher density weights around the perimeter so you have a higher moment of inertia for really good forgiveness and really good feedback when you hit the sweetspot. Everything being symmetric, from the soundwave that travels out through the materials you get a low and really soft frequency response and if you’re off it feels sharper in your hands,” Converse explains.

Today Bradley Putters produces around 300 putters a year with an average ticket of $1,250 per club. While he could outsource or automate aspects of his production process in order to churn out more volume and spur growth, he’d rather preserve his high standards and current work-life balance than expand the business.

“I’ve got my wife and a 7, 5, and 1-year-old that I really enjoy being with and I’ve designed this business to allow me to spend as much time with them as possible while enjoying what I do. I’m very not much part of that hustle culture of growth and going big for no big reason,” Converse explains.