Kalea Premiere Line Shores Up TaylorMade’s Middle Market Gap

When the Kalea line was conceived seven years ago, TaylorMade as a company internally intuited what kind of golf clubs they felt would be most attractive to women taking up the sport. Meeting their surface objectives, the visual cues in the premium introductory packaged set were decidedly feminine, but there was still significant overlap with the equivalent men’s version of the clubs.

A research-driven complete overhaul of the equipment line has dialed into the specific needs and wants of modern women golfers. In advance of the refresh, the company did a deep dive into what women are looking for when seeking out golf clubs, commissioning a comprehensive National Golf Foundation study that polled thousands of players in order to take the pulse of women’s golf.

“Kalea Premiere is designed to be for women who most likely have come into golf in the last two years. These women are athletic, they want products that are going to perform and they want a product that is distinctly feminine without being girly,” Michelle Penney, Kalea’s lead engineer, explains. She uses the example of that little black dress every woman has in her closet versus a pastel pink one to cement the distinction.

Based on the research they amassed, the key characteristics women are looking for are lightweight speed, easy launch and maximum forgiveness. Penney and her team went to work designing prototypes that put those three identifiers at the forefront.

“We looked to lighten up the product as much as possible so that they could get more ball speed out of it. And we made them as easy to launch as possible. That meant lowering the center of gravity so we could get high launch and low spin making them as forgiving as possible, generating as much inertia as we could with all these lighter weight heads,” Penney says.

The driver features carbon panels in the crown and sole to significantly reduce its weighting which is concentrated in the rear to bolster forgiveness. It’s 30 grams lighter than their standard Men’s Stealth+ build. Meanwhile, on the technology side, all of TaylorMade’s game-improvement hallmarks are integrated including twist face, inverted cone tech and their thru-slot speed pocket.

The 3, 5 and 7 fairway woods all feature 180cc heads so they’re all the same size at address only with different launch angles promoting consistent strikes and fewer mishits.

“I’ve always played a 7 wood even before Dustin Johnson made it cool. Typically, that means I’m playing a much smaller head in order to get the launch that I need,” Penney says.

“I really love these because the 7 wood is the same size as the 3 wood, so I get all the inertia of a 3 wood with the launch angle of a 7 wood. That gives me a whole lot more confidence to hit my 7 wood off the fairway,” she adds.

Priced at $1699 for an 11-piece set that includes a golf bag, the clubs are squarely aimed at the middle market buyer. These are women not quite ready to invest $600 in a new driver and then still having to shell out over $1000 for irons and still be quite a few clubs short of a complete bag. At the same time these consumers crave all the technological bells and whistles that you won’t find in lower end starter sets.

Penney acknowledges that TaylorMade previously hadn’t put as much emphasis on this middle market as competing equipment brands and the aim is for Kalea Premiere to address this gap.

“If you bracket women in terms of willingness to invest in product and skill level, that whole middle sector has been lived in by our competitors. They seemed to understand that a little more than we did,” she explains.

“With this product we wanted to not just beat our competitors, but to make something that resonated with the entire middle category of women, women who are athletic and are looking for something that has technology in it, want it to perform and yet possibly don’t want to buy clubs piecemeal, just yet,” Penney adds.

As more and more women gravitate towards golf, OEMs may begin to introduce even more SKUs to reach new entrants, as well as increasing the frequency of their refresh cycles.