In the summer of 2018, I wrote a story for our Know Your Japanese Golf Brands series that summarized more than 100 years of Mizuno history.
At that time, Mizuno was well into a revitalization of its iron business. Though it enjoyed a stellar reputation among better players, the lineup had grown bloated and arguably stale. Despite the best efforts and best intentions, Mizuno had shanked its way through the game-improvement category for years. Player’s irons are nice but game-improvement is where the industry makes its money.
Fortunes changed when Mizuno launched the Hot Metal iron as part of the JPX900 series. Clean by category standards, Hot Metal proved to be the game-improvement iron that established Mizuno as a serious player in the segment. Several revisions later, Hot Metal is Mizuno’s best-selling model. Not bad for a brand once regarded as exclusively for better players.
By any reasonable measure, Mizuno’s iron business was moving in the right direction. That was only the beginning. Behind the scenes, the company was laying plans to tackle an even bigger challenge: reestablish the Mizuno brand as a credible player in the driver category.
The Demise
Once a mainstay on the PGA Tour, the quick version of what led to Mizuno’s fall from grace with the driver can be summarized as a series of unfortunate events: a misreading of the tea leaves, PING’s release of the G2 (seriously) and the bad decisions that followed. The finer points are for another day but the summary version is that as a Tour driver brand, Mizuno had lost all credibility.






