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00:00Started my own little business of putter
00:07flipping in the Scotty Cameron world.
00:10Wait, how old did you start that business?
00:13I was 15 years old, 14, 15 years old.
00:17Stop it.
00:18Yeah, this was 97, right after the Masters.
00:21Putter entrepreneur right at 15 years old.
00:24Yeah, this is pre-eBay, pre-all that stuff.
00:27Golf web classifieds boards.
00:29Stop.
00:30Yeah, I was just like a name on a message board,
00:32but had access to stuff because I worked at a golf course
00:35and started buying and selling trading with guys overseas.
00:37It was crazy.
00:39And that led you to, you know,
00:41like you're probably making a little bit of money doing this,
00:44I imagine, over this period of time
00:46with the resale of Scotty Camerons.
00:49But when did just the design of Scotty's,
00:52just putters in general,
00:53when did that kind of cue up something of,
00:56like, hey, I not only want to sell putters,
00:59maybe my own putters one day.
01:01When did all of that sort of kind of come into view for you, Nick?
01:05So I was like, you know, again, maybe 15 years old.
01:08I was like the go-to guy on the golf team in high school
01:11that everybody wanted.
01:12Hey, can you like fix this putter for me?
01:14Can you make it look nice?
01:15And I was just tinkering in my basement, making stuff for them.
01:18But I was fortunate that at my high school,
01:20we had some 3D modeling and AutoCAD classes.
01:23And so I just thought, why not?
01:25Let's try it.
01:26Let's see.
01:27And that's really how I got into it,
01:28thinking that, hey, I could design something that's really cool.
01:30I could make my own putter.
01:32But never really fully fleshed it out.
01:34It wasn't something that, like, I was driven towards in those early years.
01:37It was just something I was tinkering with
01:38because I happened to be a really good putter,
01:41and I was always interested in, like, what makes somebody a good putter.
01:45So I was working on different neck styles, all this sort of stuff,
01:48just purely tinkering.
01:51Well, you've got a tinkerer that also on the screen,
01:53Charlie Hume down there, he changes putters every month.
01:57But Swag Off, it didn't start overnight.
01:59Like, this just didn't happen.
02:01And I want to just take me through your professional journey
02:05to get to Swag Off when you started in 2018.
02:08Yeah.
02:09So, you know, all through high school, like I said,
02:12I was kind of buying and selling.
02:13I kind of became known as a guy in the Cameron community
02:16that was able to get some really cool stuff
02:18because I had made some contacts overseas.
02:20I was in this Cameron Collectors Yahoo group
02:23that was like the original Scotty Cameron fan club
02:26and was buying and selling underneath my username
02:30and just became a guy that people talked to,
02:35was able to get some cool stuff,
02:37was invited to some of these special events they had,
02:39these Scotty Cameron Appreciation Days,
02:41met Scotty along the way.
02:43And I think that talking to him
02:45and talking to other people in the community,
02:47it became very obvious that I had an eye for it
02:49and could tell, you know, some of the nuances
02:51that other people weren't picking up on.
02:53And I was very fortunate that, you know,
02:56basically halfway through my college career
02:58when I was at the University of Iowa,
03:00I got an opportunity to fly out to California
03:02and talk with this guy, Rand,
03:06who wanted to become the biggest Scotty Cameron distributor
03:08in the country.
03:10Unfortunately, Rand passed a couple of years ago,
03:12but he was like the original real big time
03:17Scotty Cameron distributor.
03:19And I was tasked with running the Art of Putters,
03:22which is the store we opened in West LA,
03:25to sell and basically work with all the high-end collectors
03:29all over the world.
03:31Wow, that's really cool.
03:33And also curious about this too,
03:35because, you know, Scotty Cameron,
03:37this is like the time period that we're talking about.
03:40It's pre-social media.
03:42And I think just the infatuation,
03:44not only that you had, Nick, but that I had,
03:46and Charlie added, so many different golf geeks
03:48around the world.
03:50We fell in love with the brand with Scotty Cameron.
03:53Like, it was cool.
03:55It's what everybody wanted.
03:57What did you pick up from Scotty
03:59and how he was able to create a brand
04:01in a time in which you really weren't able to market it
04:04like you are now?
04:06Yeah, I mean, I think that's the...
04:08I mean, when people ask me,
04:09the thing that I always found most interesting
04:11was the ability for him to basically put a circle T
04:14on anything and make it special, right?
04:17And that doesn't happen overnight.
04:19That's building a brand from the ground up
04:21between PGA Tour usage,
04:23between the limiting of the product that goes out.
04:26Everything he did, he was spot on
04:28to create that culture from a collector's community.
04:32And as a collector of things myself,
04:34I mean, obviously I love putters,
04:36I love the golf space,
04:37but I'm into vintage pinball
04:39and vintage arcade games and watches and other things.
04:41So I'm a collector at heart of everything.
04:43And I kind of dive, you know,
04:45head first into anything I get into.
04:47I always talk about, you know,
04:48there's like the 1% of people in anything.
04:50I don't care if it's fly fishing or pickleball
04:53or golf or cars, whatever it is.
04:54Like there's that 1% of people that just go crazy, right?
04:57And they want it all.
04:58They want the crazy cool stuff.
04:59They want to have something nobody else has.
05:01And I was like that.
05:02And I think that being able to be around
05:04Scotty Cameron putters at that time,
05:06that was like really the heyday
05:08of everybody on tour is using it, right?
05:10I mean, that was like, it was crazy.
05:12If you look through the top 25,
05:14I don't know, maybe it was 18 of the guys
05:16were using a Scotty Cameron at the time.
05:18Yeah, that sounds about right.
05:20And I was definitely one of them when I played on tour.
05:23But at some point, you know, Nick,
05:26you start to, you know,
05:28you're a part of this big distribution center,
05:30but where do you take the next step of, okay,
05:32I want to grow professionally.
05:34I want to do my own thing,
05:35or I want to learn more about putter designs.
05:38And I read that Benton Ardey as well was the stop for you.
05:41Yeah, so after, you know, three and a half years
05:43doing the Scotty Cameron stuff,
05:45I just wanted to move back to Chicago.
05:47It's really the truth.
05:48I'm from Chicago.
05:49I was out in LA, didn't know anybody out there.
05:51I loved LA, but at the same time,
05:53family, friends, everybody's back here.
05:55Decided to move back to Chicago
05:56and wasn't really sure what I was going to do.
05:58And somebody introduced me to Bob Benton Ardey.
06:00And at that time, you know,
06:03I want to say polar opposite,
06:05but in a totally different place
06:06than where Scotty Cameron was in the putter space, right?
06:08And I had a lot of ideas of what I thought could be cool
06:12to make, you know, any at that point,
06:15really any putter brand cool.
06:16I, you know, I had my own ideas.
06:18I had what I thought collectors were looking for
06:20that wasn't being put out in the market.
06:22And Bob and I hit it off and I spent nine years
06:24running all the high-end tour stuff for Benton Ardey.
06:28We were selling to Korea, Japan, US collectors, events,
06:32socials, all this sort of stuff,
06:33and really building out a completely custom program for them.
06:37And even through that time, a lot of ideas,
06:40just like fell on deaf ears,
06:41not because they were bad ideas,
06:43but because it just wasn't maybe what, you know,
06:46those guys wanted to do.
06:47And so I had my little black book of ideas
06:50that I had saved for all these years.
06:52And eventually I just said, I want to do these things.
06:55So I'm going to, there's no better time to do it than now.
06:59And I had a couple of buddies who were pushing me to do it
07:01because they knew I had this idea for swag.
07:04They knew I had this idea
07:05to really do something bold and different.
07:07And they really pushed me to kind of take that leap.