Charlie at the range with his father Tyler.
Golf paraphernalia may not be the top of mind present to bring to a Sip & See or baby shower, but if Mason City, Iowa entrepreneur Tyler Johnson has his way, fun-sized carry bags will be right up there with swaddles, soft toys and bath time sets.
Tyler Johnson, a 35-year father of two kids under five, who works as a general manager at a software company, launched his toddler golf bag brand just a few months ago. Charlie Golf Co. is named after’s Johnson’s eldest. He often tags along with his pops, who played collegiate golf at the University of Northern Iowa, on trips to the driving range.
“He had his own set of cut-down clubs from my dad who likes to bring clubs to grandchildren on the first day that he meets them—they either have a blue or pink grip,” Johnson said.
When they play a little local nine-hole course, Charlie doesn’t play a hole but will mess around and hit balls from time to time and spends a lot of time playing in the bunkers or with the divot mix.
Charlie would carry tees and balls in his pockets, which he’d pilfered from his dad’s bag. These items would often roll around on the family vehicle’s floor on the way home. The annoyance at having to reach under the seat to collect these runaway items led to the creation of a golf brand.
Johnson perused kiddie bags online but found the existing products on the market, mostly shrunken down stand bags, to be ‘overkill’ for a three-year-old. When he couldn’t find the simple solution he sought, he decided to make one himself and he hopped down that rabbit hole. Johnson toyed with specifications, materials and design features before sourcing a contract manufacturer and getting down to the business of prototyping with Charlie serving as chief product tester. A handful of revisions later, Johnson green-lit an initial production run of a lightweight, single strap, pocket and club-divider carry bag made of waxed canvas with leather accents. It was now time for a trial by fire, though he took a very conservative approach and ordered just 150 of them to start.
“At that time, I had no idea what to expect,” Johnson admitted.
From informally focus-grouping friends with similar-aged kids, he observed some interest and began to build a waitlist. It started with a trickle but the floodgates opened after a post he made on X detailing why he created a toddler golf bag.
“It was a Saturday at the end of October, we were heading down to my 8-year-old niece’s birthday party, my wife was driving and I put a tweet out and it went pretty crazy. We ended up getting 800 waitlist sign-ups that day,” Johnson said.
The viral tweet has amassed just shy of a million impressions
45-days later, the initial bags hit the market and they were gobbled up faster than the runtime of an episode of Netflix’s
“There were 50 blue, 50 grey and 50 pink. They sold out in four minutes on the blues, ten minutes on the greys and I think about 28 minutes—I can’t remember exactly—on the pinks,” Johnson said.
It was already the middle of December and he reached out to his supplier to amass more inventory but was only able to get a hundred more bags before Christmas. Since then, maintaining inventory to keep up with demand has been a consistent problem.
Currently he is out stock but will have 400 bags on hand within a week. While those currently on the waitlist get a heads-up on when product is about to drop, the bags are still sold on a first come first serve basis.
When orders come in, it’s an all hands-on-deck process, with his father and wife pulling quality control duties, adding personalized hang tags, and prepping bags for shipment. Unable to afford the minimum order quantity on customized pre-printed boxes, for early releases they were hand-stamping them which can be an onerous process.
“This last [production run] my mom, wife, dad and my aunt came up and it’s crazy how much more efficient we are getting. That first 150 bag order took us two days and the last one, which was 155 bags, ended up being five hours,” Johnson said, adding that he has other aunts as well as brothers and sisters-in-law ready to chip in whenever needed.
Charlie Golf Co. has already had its first brand collaboration, teaming up with No’Easter Sticks, to package their bags with the Amesbury, Massachusetts outfit’s hickory wood alignment sticks as an add-on. Releasing their own equipment is next on the agenda for Charlie, with a line of toddler golf clubs set to be released by late Spring.
The golf bags will remain their core business but the plan is to also soon offer a driver, 7-iron, pitching wedge and putter at a very economical and aggressive price point—the bags themselves retail for $88.
“When I was growing up the money wasn’t necessarily there and I don’t want to price people out. This is all about getting kids interested in the game, that’s really what I’m after.”
