Fernando H. Green Blog: First Look: Callaway Toulon Garage Custom Program

Click for Custom

When it comes to online customization, Callaway Golf is way out in front of the other companies. Callaway Customs already allows you to order customized wedges, drivers, and balls, all from the comfort of your computer. Granted, you can’t take your custom wedge as far as Callaway’s design wizard Anthony Taranto does, but you can still personalize a wedge or driver through just a couple of clicks. No other company has that online capability right now, placing Callaway well ahead of the competition.

With today’s launch of the Toulon Garage putter customization engine, Callaway’s customization lead may prove insurmountable.

What is Toulon Garage?

Toulon Garage is a sophisticated new website that allows users to easily design and personalize a Toulon Design putter by choosing from a wide variety of features including head shape, hosel type, finish, head weight, stamps and paint fill, shaft, shaft color, grip, and loft-lie-length.

Online putter customization tools are not new. You can already use the tools at the Scotty Cameron Custom Shop to aesthetically customize a putter you send in for refinishing. A few months ago, PING, the perennial putter powerhouse, temporarily offered online custom options for their PLD1 putter. Both allowed you to see a mock-up of your custom creation, and both pale in comparison to what Odyssey/Toulon are doing.

Actually Multiple Options

At Toulon Garage, you’re the designer. Choose from our broad library of options to create a putter that’s uniquely and completely yours.

The greatest limitation of the Cameron and PING interfaces was that they were limited in customization scope. You can change some paint fill, and add a stamp or two, but you can’t swap necks, finishes, or anything truly significant in the design. Such is not the case with the Toulon Garage. Now you can truly run amok with your customization ideas.

Check out this list of options:

Choose right-hand or left-hand.
Choose your head shapes. (There are 10 heads!)
Choose your hosel design.
Choose your finish: Satin, Tour Mist, Black Pearl or Rose Gold.
Choose your alignment aid: sight line(s) or dot(s) -- or leave it unmarked.
Choose your paint fill.
Choose your stamping (letters or numbers).
Choose your sole-plate weight.
Choose your grip -- numerous options from SuperStroke and Lamkin.
Choose your shaft.
Choose your length.
Choose your loft and lie.

My quick math says that there are just under six million different ways that you can put together a putter using the Toulon Garage interface. OK, so I totally made that number up, but I bet that it is not that far from the truth. Just look at the broad range of things you can select from!

You can pick from ten different heads, both in right and left hand, and then spec the putter out dimensionally (length, loft, & lie) to meet your play needs. No, that’s not paradigm-shifting customization, nor is altering the paint colors. The fun starts after you pick your head style.

Once you pick a head, again, that’s from a list of TEN HEADS; you can then pick one of three possible finishes. This alone is a cool option, but then you can do things like selecting a different neck style. Want to game a Long Island, but with a plumbers neck? You now have that option. What if you think that the Indianapolis looks better center-shafted? You can do that too. This customization typically only happens when you work one-on-one with a small boutique putter company like Byron Morgan or the like. It’s unprecedented in the online, big company custom arena.

Another huge plus for me comes with the ability to customize alignment schemes. Now you can go line, dot, or naked alignment depending upon your personal preferences. I am not a fan of lines, preferring dot or naked. This customization now opens the door to putters that I would not have even considered in the past.

The only option missing is metal selection. The vast majority of these will be milled from 303 stainless, and feature the signature Deep Diamond face milling pattern. The Indianapolis and its multi-material construction will be the one exception to the 303 stainless build.

And if you are worried about who is building the putter, just read this:

Completed designs are built at Callaway headquarters in Carlsbad, CA by the same technicians who build most of the Odyssey putters played on the PGA Tour. Each Toulon Garage putter is packaged in a specially designed box and include a unique certificate of authenticity laser-etched onto a piece of high-grade aluminum.

How cool is that? The same people who build the putters for Tour players build your putter at Callaway HQ. You may never play golf like Phil, but the same person built your putter…

Custom has a Cost

The price for the customized Toulon Garage putters starts at $499 but can go higher depending upon some of the options selected. Rose Gold finish shoots the price up to $599. This will immediately turn off some consumers. Paying that much for a custom putter may not add up for some of you out there. However, I bet that there will be a ton of orders placed today. This new system allows you to spec out a putter to match your stroke, and then customize it further to match your aesthetics. I’d be willing to bet that the lifespan of a new $500 putter will be years longer than a new $500 driver.

So what do you think? Get on the Toulon Garage site and build your custom putter. I’m curious what you will come up with. Do you see this type of customization and the way of the future, or will it flash and then fizzle out? In the coming weeks, I’ll be building a custom putter using the Toulon Garage program, and then sharing with you the finished product. Stay tuned!