Five years ago, "DTC golf clubs" meant one or two brands and a lot of scepticism. Now it's a genuine category, crowded enough that the interesting question has shifted from "can a DTC brand make good clubs" to "which DTC brand is actually right for you." That's a much better problem for golfers to have, and a much harder one for brands to solve.
Sub 70 and Takomo sit at the top of the mid-price tier, and for very different reasons. Sub 70's pitch is breadth — a full range of irons, wedges, hybrids and woods, backed by a 60-day trial period, with John Daly's unsponsored endorsement doing a lot of the credibility work. Takomo's pitch is closer to community: hollow-body forged irons built in Finland, part-owned by Grant Horvat and the Bryan Brothers, which gives them a built-in audience of golf YouTube regulars who already trust the people behind the brand.
New Level Golf occupies similar mid-tier territory with forged irons aimed at better players who know what forged construction actually feels like and don't want to pay an OEM name tax for it. It's a smaller operation than Sub 70 or Takomo, without the same YouTube-driven following, but the pitch — tour-quality construction without tour-brand pricing — is the same thesis the whole category is built on.
At the budget end, Stix Golf and LAZRUS Golf are solving a different problem entirely: not "how do we make DTC clubs for enthusiasts," but "how do we get someone into golf without an $800 barrier turning into $2,000." Stix's complete 14-club sets undercut a beginner OEM set on price while still looking deliberate rather than cheap. LAZRUS goes a step further on accessibility — of the clubs brands in this space, it's one of the few using Shopify's Managed Markets to ship to 50+ countries, which matters if you're outside North America and tired of DTC brands that quietly mean "US only."
“The question was never whether DTC clubs could be good. The question was always which DTC brand actually fits how you play — and increasingly, where you live.”
None of these brands are really "winning" in the sense of beating the others outright — they're not competing for the same golfer. Sub 70 wins on breadth and trial-period confidence, Takomo wins on community trust, New Level wins on feel-per-dollar for better players, and Stix and LAZRUS win on getting a first set into more hands, in more countries, without the sticker shock. The real story of the DTC club field in 2026 isn't consolidation — it's specialisation.