Golfers are an incredibly superstitious bunch who pray not only for birdies to drop in the hole but for already struck tee shots to course correct mid-flight. The deities who preside over the domain of golf courses are often invoked to explain lucky breaks like a wayward tee shot that would probably end up being a lost ball if it hadn’t rebounded off a tree and miraculously rolled onto the middle of the fairway.

Before Golf Gods—a social media-fueled novelty powerhouse based in Adelaide, Australia, that morphed into a full-on golf apparel brand—gained loft and became the $6 million-a-year business it is today, its blue-collar progenitors juggled their entrepreneurial ambitions alongside their day jobs.

Dale Smedley installed glass paneled pool fencing, while his buddy Shaun Trevillian, a longtime mate from their teenage years as Aussie Rules football teammates, spent his days fitting pipes. The glazier and the plumber saw ecommerce ideas taking off left and right and decided they wanted in on the party.

In 2014, Instagram was just four years old, but businesses built off the platform were already finding success. Smedley and Trevillian, new to golf, initially aimed to create content that highlighted the sport’s silly, sophomoric side. As their following grew, they made a modest $2,000 investment, launched a website, and ordered ten logoed hats—selling out the first batch, then one hundred more. The business began to snowball from there. Today, Golf Gods has over 600,000 Instagram followers with an additional 118,000 on TikTok.

The company co-founders credit their work ethic and dedication to cultivating following as key to their success. Since inception, they have never gone a 24-hour period without posting content to their social media platforms and cite their ability to lean on each other to help maintain momentum.

“We never took a day off. We just never stopped. Every single day we would wake up, talk about what was going on, even before we had many products,” Smedley explained, adding that level of consistency carried through to their attention to customer service.

Having a partner to pick up the slack so that the workload and responsibility didn’t rest on one set of shoulders also proved vital, as Trevillian points out.

“In the entrepreneurship space there are a lot of opinions on whether to have a business partner or not. For us, having two of us meant that if one was feeling a little bit flat about something, the other was up and about so we were both never flat,” he adds.

In the first few years, Golf Gods was mainly a side-hustle. They kept their day jobs and in the afternoons packed and shipped out orders. They weren’t reliant on the income coming in for their livelihood, but as their returns grew, it was only a matter of time before they would ditch their tools entirely.

According to Smedley, his best month running his glazier business was $50,000 in a month and the plan was to go full-time once their sales hit that mark, which they did in 2017.

Today, Golf Gods ship to over 400,000 customers in 146 countries, and they now have a team of eighteen employees, when including contractors, helping to spread the company’s gospel. A moment that really encapsulates the brand’s ascent in the golf industry came during a trip to Arizona to take in the PGA Tour’s notoriously rowdy Waste Management Phoenix Open.

“We’re two young lads from the country in South Australia and we are now in Scottsdale seeing people walk around the biggest golf event, in terms of attendance, and there are people everywhere wearing our Titties hats and our Golf Gods brand,” Smedley recollected.

Those Titleist parody caps, which would entangle them in a legal battle with Acushnet over trademark infringement, gave Golf Gods a viral moment. While they would eventually cease selling that product as a result, its success spawned future puerile products and bawdy kitsch intent on garnering laughs.

“The Shocker Glove is our number one selling product and has been since its release,” Smedley said. While crass novelty items leaning into a sophomoric sense of humor remain an important part of Golf Gods sales verticals, in recent years they have made a big push into apparel with lines of polyblend performance polos, quarter zips, and pants along with gear that embraces their core irreverent brand identity—think brand send-ups like “Bogey King” and White Tees Hard Slicer” hoodies.

“People who don’t take themselves that seriously is the target market we try to hit,” Smedley explained.

Heavenly Ambition—What’s Next for Golf Gods

With a firm eye towards future growth, Golf Gods believes they are ready to capitalize on emerging trends while expanding the size of their flock. The company sees plenty of runway in the apparel space, having enjoyed a 30% increase in sales in their Generation Z-oriented lines over the past two years.

The company sees plenty of runway to grow in the apparel space where they’ve enjoyed a 30% increase in sales in their youth-oriented lines in the past two years.

“A lot of comments from young people is that it’s a stuffy old man sport, but it doesn’t have to be. And when you realize you can go out for four or five hours and have a couple beers” Smedley said, adding that you don’t have to shoot under par or have a low handicap to have fun.

They also attribute the growth to the more people in their demographic sweetspot—teenagers and twenty-somethings—taking up the sport. According to a recent data release from the National Golf Foundation, there are 26 million on-course players in the United States. Of that total, 6.3 million are between18 and 34 making that age bracket the largest cohort of golfers.

Looking ahead Golf Gods see green shoots in women’s wear and hired a dedicated product designer to focus on that growing vertical. They have tested the waters before with women’s apparel but going forward it will become more of a dedicated strategic focus.

“You need to get the fit and fabric right, those are what women want to see rather than just another polo with a print on it and it’s definitely a market we want to tap into and I feel it’s a bit like the Gen Z market. Ten years-ago women’s golf was mostly for 65+ but now, especially in America, you just have to go to a driving range to see the rise in the number of younger women and girls under 30 playing and that’s who we will target,” Smedley said.

Their operation has consisted of a pair of 7600 square foot facilities in Australia for a number of years but they purchase a warehouse in Denver six months back to markedly speed up stateside deliveries and set up a showroom in Bangkok last December to establish an Asian beachhead.

“The American warehouse is based around our Amazon sales. Amazon is a really good seller for a number of our funnier, lighthearted products. Getting it quicker to market is very important and having it shipped straight out of Denver has given us the opportunity to ship quickly-if you ship from Australia it takes seven to ten days, unless you go with an express service which is very expensive,” Trevillian said, adding that the retail giant currently accounts for 5% of overall sales.

Golf Gods see the Thailand showroom as a home base to build a network throughout the region, with eyes on expansion in Singapore and Indonesia in the future as they continue to scale up. Despite general cost of living headwinds hitting consumers, they’re bullish on the golf market overall and project achieving 20% growth in 2025 will be a tap-in putt. As for the fickle winds of fashion they perceive a shift away from bright, loud polo prints towards subtler streetwear inspired looks is coming.

“The good thing is we are flexible and wherever it does go we will be able to position ourselves as the fun brand and if that means smarter fits with a Golf Gods logo than that’s what it’ll be,” Trevillian said.