The Studio

The set that started it

In the winter of 2008 a member at a course south of the valley brought in a set of irons and asked why every ball he hit well finished left of target. He was not a beginner — single figures, a repeating swing, decades of play. Three shops had told him it was his grip. The irons had never been put on a board.

They were four degrees upright. He was five foot six with a long torso and short arms, and he had been sold a set at standard specification because that was what came in the box. Bending them took twenty minutes. He shot two rounds in the seventies the following week and stopped needing to aim thirty feet right of every flag.

None of that is a remarkable story to anyone who works a bench. What was remarkable was how ordinary it turned out to be. The next year we opened this shop with a single stated purpose: check the geometry before doing anything else, on every player, every time.

Why Salt Lake City, and why this building

The unit on West Temple was a machine shop before it was a golf shop, which is why the floor takes a bench mount without flexing and why the ventilation in the back room handles epoxy and grinding dust without complaint. It is not a pretty building. It has never had a putting green in the window or a coffee machine in the waiting area.

What it has is two bays with real grass panels alongside firm mats, a loft and lie machine bolted to a floor that does not move, and enough room to lay a full set out flat and measure it club by club. The rent is low enough that we can afford to tell a customer their existing clubs are fine.

Location matters in a second way. The Wasatch Front presents a specific and slightly unusual set of fitting conditions — elevation above four thousand feet, dry air, turf that goes from soft in April to bone hard in August, and courses built on a slope. Fitting well here means fitting for those conditions rather than importing recommendations written for humid, flat, sea-level golf.

What independence actually costs

We hold no brand agreements. No minimum order volumes, no rebate tiers, no manufacturer signage on the wall. That decision has a price: we cannot access the deepest discount pricing, we do not get early access to new releases, and we are not listed on anybody's official fitter directory.

What we get in return is the ability to say "your current shaft is fine, keep it" without that sentence costing us a quota. Every fitting recommendation this shop has ever issued was made by someone with no financial interest in the answer, and that is the whole product.

Where the sizing work came from

A large share of our sessions now involve players who fall outside the middle of the size distribution — juniors mid-growth, women fitted from stock sets built to an averaged body, and older players whose posture has changed since the last time anyone measured them. That was not a plan. It happened because those are the players for whom standard specifications are most often wrong, and once a few of them told a friend, it compounded.

It has shaped the shop. The bench journal is mostly about this work, the junior and family session exists because of it, and the measurement protocol we run at the start of every fitting was refined on players the standard charts do not describe well.

What has not changed since 2009

The sequence. Measure the player. Read the ground contact on their own clubs. Fix the geometry. Then, and only then, let components compete. Everything else in this shop — the equipment, the shelf, the hours, the two of us who were here at the start and the two who joined later — is arranged in service of running that sequence properly.

Meet the people who run it →