Launched early this year, beginning with select golf clothing styles, Sun Day Red is best described as a collaboration between Woods and the 45-year-old golf gear brand TaylorMade. As of Wednesday, the company took a significant step by introducing its first golf shoes, developed according to Woods’s specifications and tested by the legend on the course.

According to Charley Hudak, the brand’s senior creative director of footwear, and Tyler Pinkos, its head of footwear development and sourcing — who both joined the Glossy Podcast for this week’s episode — the introductory Pioneer Cypress style is the first of many Sun Day Red shoes that will be hitting the market. Running shoes, Chelsea boots and dress loafers could eventually be found in the brand’s assortment.   

Also on the podcast, Hudak and Pinkos discussed the process of working with Woods on product development, the growth potential for Sun Day Red and the opportunity to build a Smithsonian-worthy shoe. Highlights from the conversation, below, have been lightly edited for clarity. 

Creating a differentiated golf shoe

Hudak: “Tiger, Tyler and I all worked together to come up with a game plan. We started back in February on the launch. … First and foremost, our four pillars were essentially: Get the fit right, No. 1. No. 2, make sure that it’s comfortable. And then, No. 3, which is pretty much the most important piece for Tiger, was that it performed. … And then fourth was the aesthetic — making it look beautiful, making it check all the boxes for [Tiger], aesthetically. But what you’ll see is, kind of, a more heritage, classic model upper design — we call it a modern saddle. And then, ultimately, we dove into the performance. And we canvassed the whole thing, turned over every stone to make sure that it would perform to the exact specifications of Tiger: engineering the bottom, engineering all the traction lugs, engineering the spike locations, and then making sure that the cushion aspects of the midsole and the outsole could combine with one another to be a high-performance golf shoe.” 

Golf shoes are just the start

Pinkos: “The footwear team’s five-year plan [includes] starting in the high-performance golf shoe category — we want to make sure that the people on tour and the avid gamer have a tool to perform at the highest level. And then, from there, we want to evolve into more of that sport-contemporary, athletic style silhouette — we’ll do spikeless and spiked versions of that, because some people gravitate more toward an athletic build, and some people like the more classic build. When we met with Tiger, originally, we showed him probably 30 different design CADs, and he immediately pointed to a style very similar to this [first style release] and said, ‘That’s me. I’m that guy.’ And so that’s the lane we picked to run down at the beginning. But, as the team grows, we foresee going into different categories. And the exciting category is the adaptive lifestyle [category], where we can participate in the training, the running, … and even go as far as [making] a Chelsea boot or a loafer or casual [shoe] — [styles] Tiger can wear to an event or an awards ceremony. We see Sun Day Red as starting in golf, but quickly moving into lifestyle … and, really, taking over the world.”

Guesstimating demand 

Pinkos: “We’ve had many, many roundtable meetings with marketing, operations, sales, … you name it. The president got involved, the CEO of TaylorMade has been involved. Everyone comes to the table with different experience and different data. The problem is that there are no historical [examples] here — so we took our best educated guess and developed the line. We’ll be launching with five different colorways. Three of them will be the Pioneer Cypress [style]. We have a white, a gray and a black with some really pretty accent hits. And then there’s the Pioneer Cypress LE, or limited edition — those will be in smaller quantities, and those are going to have a red bottom, maybe with some fun splatter paint on them — just more energy and excitement. The whole goal there is that, on Sundays, he’s got to have a little red on his on his footwear, too.”