The PGA Tour has recently sought to attract younger, hipper fans, particularly by growing the game of golf online. Now it’s backing a startup to accelerate that effort. Last week, the organization announced its investment as part of a $20 million Series A funding round for media and commerce company Pro Shop.
Pro Shop’s origins are closely connected to Netflix’s golf docuseries, Full Swing. After a successful first season, the tour looked to do more with executive producer Chad Mumm, who came back with a pitch to link the sport of golf to mainstream culture using the PGA Tour’s existing strengths. Mumm will serve as president of Pro Shop, co-founding it with CEO Joe Purzycki and COO David Miller.
“Golf is having a cultural moment,” Mumm said. “But it’s this groundswell of independent consumer brands, and then these big entrenched brands. How do we connect the dots between the two? How do we make golf just seem fun and cool? Golf as a lifestyle I think is a really powerful idea.”
What does that look like, exactly? That’s still somewhat TBD.
For one, Pro Shop will look to generate more golf-related projects in Hollywood. The company also has its eyes on commerce, with the potential to sell merchandise tied to the IP it develops.
“We talk about Goop a lot,” Mumm said, referencing the brand founded by Gwyneth Paltrow. “It’s tapped into an ethos of wellness as a lifestyle, and it’s both very credible to that audience as an editorial brand but also as a place to buy things.”
Pro Shop raised the $20 million in large part to fund acquisitions, particularly among the rising crop of consumer-focused digital media brands that have already changed the nature of sports experiences.
Today’s fans often follow their favorite athletes through social media, get news via podcasts and form their identity around retail brands. Media companies such as Men in Blazers, Barstool Sports, MeatEater and Dirty Mo Media have themselves become loci of fan communities. More than ever, personalities drive consumer behavior, from tune-in decisions to product purchases.
Leagues have responded, encouraging independent voices to make videos related to their games and even working those celebrities into event planning. In some cases, those names are brought in-house, though keeping them separate usually comes with more creative freedom and the potential to reach wider audiences. Every major league today is thinking not just about its broadcast strategy or social media presence, but how it can reach viewers through the lenses of food, fashion, music, pets—you name it.
“We’re constantly trying to grow our audience, diversify our fan base, get younger, more female, more diverse,” PGA Tour senior VP of media business development Chris Wandell said. “Our hope is that projects like Pro Shop and some of the content ideas that come out of that business will create all of these new fans.”
The PGA Tour had been building a youth-focused digital brand, Skratch, with 12 employees and content that reached 100 million fans annually. Pro Shop will now take over that team and business, with plans to release new content beginning later this summer and a renewed focus on golf lifestyle pieces.
Pro Shop will also have tour event and archive media rights to leverage, along with the legitimacy that comes with its ties. The funding round was led by Powerhouse Capital (which previously invested in The Athletic) with additional participation from EP Golf Ventures (launched by Elysian Park and the PGA of America). Along the way, Mumm said, Pro Shop brands will maintain a distinct voice from what the PGA Tour puts out.
“You can’t feel like it’s state-run media,” he said. “It’s sort of the best of both worlds where we have access to their tremendously valuable assets to do storytelling, but they don’t control what we write or what we say or how we go about it.”
Mumm said the trust necessary for such an arrangement was built over the last two years, as he helped produce Full Swing amid a seemingly endless stream of behind-the-scenes drama. Season two of the show dropped last week after the debut entry garnered more than 50 million viewing hours between its February 2023 launch and the end of last June.
Pro Shop hopes to accelerate the growing grassroots interest in golf—participation was up 35% between 2018 and 2023, according to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, with notable celebrities like DJ Khaled and Travis Kelce stumping for the sport—while also connecting those local players with the pro game.
“A lot of our future is dependent on our players becoming a lot more popular than they already are,” Wandell said. “Fans are going to tune in because of the players that play in our tour.”
