When a woman golfer walks into a pro shop or a golf specialty store to make a purchase for herself, she expects a different retail experience than her male counterpart does.
Within the last decade, retailers of golf equipment and apparel, as well as golf professionals giving lessons, have wised up to the shopping attitudes of women, and their stores show this from the first step through the front door.
First of all, they’re making room for women, giving them their own department. That was not always the case.
“You can’t take women’s clubs and throw them into a section with men’s clubs and expect women to go wandering through it,” said Joe Ricci, co-owner of Joe and Leigh’s Discount Golf and Pro Shop in South Easton, Mass. “We have a dedicated women’s department, because women are a segment of the market that needs to be catered to.”
Also, stores’ owners and managers are learning from experience that women – in contrast to men – hold onto their equipment longer before considering a trade-in; want to buy coordinated and accessorized sets of clothing for the three golfing seasons; and gravitate toward group lessons, clinics and on-course instruction.
“Men change equipment like they change their socks,” said Ted Larsen, assistant manager at Golfers’ Warehouse in Cranston. “Women hold on to their equipment. They say, ‘It feels fine; it gets the job done.’ ”
Larsen and several other managers who noticed the same pattern think they know the reason for the difference. “Guys want to buy a better game rather than to work on a better game,” Larsen said.
Ricci added: “Men perceive the new technology as a way of improving their game. They are competitive. Women are out there [on the golf course] more for the fun and the social aspect. Women are more into golf as a social experience.”
When it comes to golf apparel, however, women are the big shoppers. Men will buy a golf shirt, retailers said; women want fashionable-looking mix-and-match outfits, a large selection of colors and styles, coordinated accessories, and outfits for each season.
Barry Westall, head PGA pro at the Newport Country Club, host to this week’s U.S. Women’s Open, said retailers need to “be size-conscious and offer variety and multiple colors” to attract the female golfer’s dollars.
The purchase of golf lessons is another area where women show definite preferences.
“Golf is a more social activity for women than for men,” said David Sibley, general manager and PGA pro at the Wentworth Hills Golf Club in Plainville, Mass. “Men compete; women go out and want to spend time with their friends. This translates into different lesson categories.”
Women tend to like group lessons and clinics, Sibley and others said. Westall added that women also like on-course instruction, with its heightened element of teaching course etiquette and how to navigate the course in a timely fashion. Women make up half the on-course students at Newport, he said, even though they play only 20 to 25 percent of the rounds.
Patty Ianiere, co-owner of the Golf-Hers store in Seekonk, has studied women golfers’ buying practices in a more formal way in the process of preparing a business plan for the 11-month-old store that she co-founded with her sister.
Ianiere, who has been playing the sport for 25 years, said “it was hard to find good selection and people who spoke our language” at traditional pro shops. Despite the challenges, however, the sport expects women’s golf to be its fastest-growing segment over the next six years.
And that projection, along with Ianiere’s experience, pushed her to create Golf-Hers, with the full expectation that there is a market out there for a shop catering to women.
