Pins & Aces: The People’s Brand Has Grown Up

Since coming online in 2018, Pins & Aces has been seen as an outlet for the irreverent golfer.

It’s for the guy who likes quirky voodoo doll head covers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle polos. He doesn’t mind a little music and a few drinks on the course, which might come courtesy a P&A liquor stick. His hat might read “Mourning Wood Casket Company” or “Parlay Investment Group: Lose Your Money The Right Way”.

This is not your buttoned-up, country club golfer. He’s here to have fun, and Pins & Aces is helping him to make that statement.

But what the average golf consumer might not realize is that Pins & Aces has been expanding well beyond this realm over the past couple of years.

It’s a small American business that has developed more dynamic, higher-quality offerings: modern apparel that is versatile to be worn in a variety of settings, legitimate golf bags designed for the serious player and, through a recent acquisition of Edel Golf, actual clubs.

All of it is at an affordable price—a point of pride with the brand—that makes it accessible to all types of player, even if that player leans more traditional.

The company, known as “the people’s brand” for its inclusiveness, still has the iconoclastic DNA you came to love it for. That hasn’t changed.

What’s different is that Pins & Aces has grown up.

It all started with head covers

For those unfamiliar, the Pins & Aces story is one of ingenuity and sweat equity.

Nicklaus Mertz and Jon Major—brother-in-laws who are married to Scottish sisters—had the entrepreneurial spirit of trying to figure out what kind of items could sell on Amazon. They tried things like knife magnets and cigar cases, but nothing quite clicked.

That was until 2018 when they noticed a glaring gap in the market of golf head covers.

“I bought a Callaway Epic driver and I hated the head cover,” Mertz said. “It was this off-lime green. I went to go buy another head cover, but I didn’t want something like Kiawah Island that I played years ago or whatever. I wanted something fun.

“I looked at other brands and they were great, but they were $150. I don’t want to spend that. And then the less expensive ones were like cheap, Chinese-made junk that were $30. Why wasn’t there a head cover at like $60?”

Mertz and Alex Bard, who would become the GM of Pins and Aces in 2020, had worked together in the mannequin business, developing a lot of cut-and-sew knowledge. Seeing this gap in the marketplace, combined with the experience they had, made it an easy sell to get things going.

After having immediate success with reasonably priced head covers that featured the Colorado and Texas state flags, it was evident this would work.

Unique, affordable head covers gave Pins & Aces the kickstart it needed. The gap in the head cover market reflected other opportunities for products geared towards the non-serious golfer. This category became more saturated after the pandemic hit, but Pins & Aces had an eye on it early.

Now, seven years in, the brand has matured from a side hustle into a $20 million per year business that has evolved beyond that niche of the offbeat.

“It’s kind of evolving out of the fun, crazy, whacky brand,” Mertz said. “Everyone was trying to do the whacky shit in 2020, 2021. It became acceptable at higher-end clubs. I wouldn’t say it was necessarily a fad, because there is still a market for that.

“But as we’re growing up, we’re reaching a broader market where people are saying, ‘Hey, Pins & Aces is some really nice stuff.'”

A fully American small business

After initially operating out of Mertz’s garage, and then a condo in a business park, Pins & Aces bought a 14,000-square-foot distribution center (and a small store) in Arvada, Colorado, on the northwest side of Denver. They have since added space to that location.

Serendipitously, their address is 5280 Ward Drive. Being in the Mile High City and somehow getting an address that is the exact number of feet to a mile? That has to be a good sign.

Pins & Aces and its 34 employees do all of the packing and shipping out of that warehouse. It’s vertically integrated in house, all the way down to photography and embroidery. And about 80 percent of its revenue is direct-to-consumer online, so it’s a lot of order fulfillment from HQ.

The business is split fairly evenly with about a third of sales in apparel, another third in golf bags and the last third in accessories. On the wholesale/greengrass side, the business skews heavily to apparel.

With the assembly elements kept in-house, those savings are purposefully passed on to the common golfer. There are no polos on the site that cost more than $70. And head covers max out around $65.

This a fundamental core value of the Pins & Aces ethos. They want to be known as golfer friendly and “the people’s brand”—a moniker that has been sticking since recent appearances at the Waste Management Phoenix Open (known to many as “the people’s tournament”).

“It’s priced for every golfer, and we want it to be very approachable,” said Major, a former linebacker for the University of Colorado Buffaloes. “To be the people’s brand is everything from design to price point to service to giveaways. We’re very friendly on freebies. We want to be known as the brand for the people.”

Growing up on multiple fronts

A point of emphasis in the Pins & Aces evolution has been creating high-quality products for a wider range of golfer, all while keeping prices modest.

You can see this in the player preferred golf bags (both cart and stand) which were introduced in the fall of 2023. After struggling with their initial golf bag in 2021, Pins & Aces has since come up with a bag that is legitimate in quality and country club-ready in terms of style.

The R&D was even done in Scotland with caddies at Turnberry who provided invaluable feedback prior to launch.

Whereas their competitors are mainly priced around $450 or so, the Pins & Aces stand bags are $330.

“It’s been one of our best-selling products,” Mertz said. “We can make a high quality product that doesn’t have to come with a ridiculously high price point.”

That sentiment carries over to the player preferred polos where the volume has been dialed down to make for stylish yet classy patterns that can work at a nice dinner as well as on the course (the tag line there is “from bunker to board room”). You can also see that in the limited edition Royal Collection that recently hit the site.

“The player preferred line is more high end that is geared towards the older golfer, the more professional golfer,” Mertz said. “There’s that kind of vibe to it where we can be taken seriously.”

PGA Tour player Rafael Campos started wearing Pins & Aces polos out of nowhere in 2021. He wasn’t sponsored—he just liked the product and decided to start wearing it.

“He just wants to feel good and he says it’s the best polo he’s worn,” Mertz mentioned.

When Campos won the 2024 Butterfield Bermuda Championship, he was front and center wearing a $70 polo. There are also a handful of Korn Ferry Tour players who wear the brand.

Having pros wear their polo is greatly appreciated, but Pins & Aces is not reliant on that kind of advertising in the same way larger brands might be. You won’t see them in much traditional marketing, either. It’s a word of mouth, social media-driven, community-based brand that takes the savings from a shoestring ad budget and passes them on to the consumer.

That accessibility is a core principle—and they don’t want to sacrifice that as the business grows.

And the growing up of the business hasn’t just been based on new products. Admittedly, Pins & Aces has been more willing to listen to constructive criticism as the business has progressed.

“When we first launched, people would ask for the head covers to be tighter or for the polos to be looser around the hips, or whatever else it would be,” Mertz said. “And it was like ‘What do they know?’ But we look back and think, ‘Our products weren’t nearly as good back then.'”

In the words of Major, it’s all about being nimble enough to “make constant improvements” by listening to customers.

And now here come the golf clubs

Pins & Aces used to say they sell everything except shoes, balls and clubs.

You can strike clubs off that list.

In January of this year, it was announced that the brand had acquired Edel Golf. Also headquartered in the Denver area, Edel focuses on irons, wedges and putters.

“The first thing we did was cut prices dramatically,” Major said. “It’s still elite engineering, elite club design, great legacy—but adding them to our ecosystem allowed us to slash the price. We want to do that for people. We want them to get the best quality, maximum performance products into the most people’s hands.”

The Pins & Aces team also felt like Edel was previously trying to sell itself as a high-end boutique brand but didn’t have the market for that. Those kind of consumers are buying the top of the line offerings from PXG or TaylorMade or Titleist or Miura.

Putting Edel in the middle of the golf club pricing bell curve gives them a different market to sell more and still be profitable.

Pins & Aces is for everyone

One thing Major explained really stuck out to me during our talk.

“We want to protect the people,” he said.

That means giving them a one-stop shop where both quality and price aren’t sacrificed. With the way costs have been impacting the golf industry, that type of model has become a rarity.

But there is also another element to protecting the people. It means emboldening golfers to be exactly who they want to be on the course.

The original Pins & Aces concept was encouraging golfers to let their colors fly. Be the jokester, be patriotic, be self-deprecating, be outlandish—play golf in an unconventional way.

This new, grown-up version of Pins & Aces is still doing that. It’s still protecting the people.

All they are saying now is that everyone is welcome. If you are someone who cares about their handicap and wants to play great gear, you are also encouraged to do exactly that.

Play the game however you want to play it.

We can all raise a glass to that.

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