Toulon Design is quickly gaining recognition as a top line putter manufacturer.
With their newly opened customization facility, The Toulon Garage, they just increased their already rising status.
Recently The Breakfast Ball had a chance to experience all the fun that is happening in San Diego, CA. With the beautiful weather and fun lifestyle their custom shop, The Toulon Garage has been constructed. Today we are going to walk you through one of the biggest brands that are taking the golf industry by storm. With decades of experience in the golf industry; a mix of family, college athletes, and business professionals, the brand was born.
Toulon Design consists of co-founders Sean, Tony, Joe, and B.J. These are names you would get to know very well when dealing with the company. The amount of pride and sincere appreciation they have for their end user is unparalleled.
So who are these guys?
“We are a golf company. We are a putter maker. That’s who we are, at the very heart of it. We design and create the most beautiful putters in the world for the serious golfer. And that’s what we are going to stay true to”- Sean
Let’s get started.
When picking out what design was going to be best for my game, we decided the San Diego was about as good as it gets for my stroke.
Wait, San Diego? What in the world is that?!
Well, like every other aspect of the brand, they do things very differently. The names of their putter models are all major cities.
Why?
Because they are essential cities to the founders, the history of golf, and what they believe to be significant landmarks in the brand’s creation.
The San Diego is another classic tour design. Very linear in its shaping, the San Diego is expertly tailored and sleek. While the lines are crisper, each radius and edge has been painstakingly milled and then hand polished to soften the edges, while maintaining the ease of alignment this design provides. The San Diego is further complemented with a classic L-neck hosel.
An excellent feature for all models is how they can accommodate the different types of putting strokes. They do this by offering three different weighting systems, both in the head and in the grip. Options offered are standard, Moderate Release (MR), or Aggressive Release (AR). The ideal head weight for my putting stroke is near 350g, so the Sand Diego’s stock 352 grams worked out perfectly for me.
One fantastic breakthrough they have accomplished across its model offerings is the unique milled face.
The new face was something that was trial and errored an extraordinary amount of times to perfect. The reasoning behind the face technology is that so much of the players feel, will be directly involved in the sound the club produces. Sean and his team, had this perfected before ever going to market. With his name on over 80 patents, this is a captain I would want steering the ship.
Inspired by a clean and straightforward design, that brings performance that a player can feel, is what this group is all about. The dissipation of sound from the face at impact gives an illusion to the golfer that the putter is softer than it is, enhancing the feel in a way that’s truly unique.
My putter arrival was the most memorable one I have had to date.
When it arrived at the house, I wasn’t sure if it was one putter or a bookshelf. It was an enormous box, proudly branded with the companies stylish logo.
Bringing this huge box inside (sideways) I childishly ran through the house looking for scissors. Once the enormous packaging was opened up, it was like a ray of sunshine coming out of the brown cardboard outer skin. Inside was a gorgeous gloss white marble box, with a fresh mint green font. It showcased the putter, a certificate of authenticity, and two smaller boxes.
Inside the smaller boxes proudly held the limited release head cover and valuables pouch, along with the weighting system tool.
I had never seen anything like it.
It was the same presentation you would expect opening a new Rolex or finely packaged bottle of wine. It was classy, elegant, and beautiful.
As my excitement grew, I was also somewhat surprised. How could someone spend this much time and money packaging a product, when everyone else doesn’t? And that’s when it hit me. They’re not going to be everyone else, not even a little bit. They are here to stand in a league of their own. From the transparent interactive marketing to the face milling, to how they ship product, it was going to be their very own representation of what the putter industry should be.
My San Diego came from the newly opened Toulon Garage. This is an option available for someone looking to make personal adjustments or customization’s to their already beautiful putter.
Express yourself creatively, Toulon Garage Custom offers you the options of picking the model, hosel, finish, hand stamping and paint fills that will make your putter truly one-of-a-kind. Just like we would handle custom options with a Tour professional, our skilled putter makers will guide you every step of the way to support you in the process of creating and precisely building your putter, which is then delivered to you in an impressive package that includes a Garage edition head cover and Certificate of Authenticity. You can be assured that your Custom putter will meet all of your desired design and performance standards.
So how does the Toulon Garage work? It is a 3-stage process:
- Step 1- Choose the right model for you – Toulon Garage Custom currently offers customization on Madison, San Diego, and Rochester models.
- Step 2- Choose your hosel – Our Vacuum Brazing process enables us to efficiently fit the hosel of your choice to our Madison, San Diego, and Rochester model putters. We currently have three hosels to choose from, and you can refer to the illustrations below to select the option that works best for you.
- Step 3- Select your putter finish – Toulon Design has developed three different finishes to choose from, each with a distinctive elegance that will be timeless in appeal. Our priorities in offering these finishes are two-fold: first, they must be authentic to Tour performance standards; second, they must seamlessly mesh with the refined design characteristics that are fundamental to our Toulon Design visual aesthetic.
Once the three steps have been selected to build your perfect masterpiece, you can then go over with your sales rep on things such as custom adjustments, stamping, and shaft options. All of these things combined will result in a beautiful show piece that not only sinks putts but will create quite the buzz on the green with your playing partners.
For me, the Toulon Garage treatment is an absolute must.
The personalization of a great product is about as good as it gets. The level of quality put into this process, and the first class finishing techniques will forever change the custom putter process. The Garage putters can get some assistance with help from the reps who will walk you through the process. To ensure they get every detail correct and your canvas gets painted precisely to your vision of a masterpiece.
The Toulon Garage process ranges from $449-$650 depending on model selection and customization choices. The build times vary depending on finishes and custom options, but my putter build time was roughly 2.5 weeks before arriving at my house. It’s an incredible turnaround time for a hand finished putter of this caliber.
Now I am sure you must be thinking…fantastic design, excellent finishing, but how does she roll? Does this show pony do both?
I think the most significant performance aspect was the sound impact, or lack of, that came off the face. The time spent on coming up with a new face milled design was time well invested. The sound that occurs at impact is unique, or lack of would be more accurate. I went back and forth finding the perfect word or phrase for the sound produced, and the term I kept coming back to was “thorough.” Odd way to describe I know, but the putter is not clicky, nor is it muted.
The feedback feels great. And for lack of overuse of the words such as “pure” or “like butter,” to me, it feels, thorough. A solid stroke yields you this soothing sound that makes the club feel fantastic. And when a club feels terrific, the stroke breeds confidence. I commend them and their team for investing in this aspect of the manufacturing first, to bring not just a great looking club but a great feeling club as well.
Toulon has spent an incredible amount of time in bringing a great performing club to market.
They carry a ton of experience and passion to the brand. But for me, this isn’t what stands out the most. In a world full of big-box retailers and shareholders dictating the customer experience, the way they treat their putting family is second to none.
There are very few brands who have mastered this and are always leading their respective industries. Toulon Design is well on the path to accomplishing this. Regardless if you are purchasing a custom built Toulon Garage version, or merely a fitted ball cap. Your package will include a hand-written note from the team. Thanking you for your business and a genuine hope that you love it. The packaging will be classy and proud.
The brand has no problem expressing it is here to set the tone on how putters should be sold. In a short time, they have made a splash, in a pool full of a lot of people doing things very similar. With the perfect storm of industry experience and young new age ideas, this is a putter company that needs to be on everyone’s radar. And once you roll it, it will be a brand you will undoubtedly want in your bag.
“I think when golfers see our product and hit a putt with it for the first time, I think they are going to feel the heart, the soul, the passion. They are going to feel the same things we felt when we built the products and designed them, and ultimately created what we think are the best putters in the world.” –Sean
For more information about Toulon Designs, The Toulon Garage and more, give their website a visit.
They are also very active on social media so be sure to give them a follow if you don’t already. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube
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