When the CEO of your putter company becomes the swing coach in someone's documented quest to go from 13 to scratch, you are not selling putters anymore. You are selling belief.
Sam Hahn, who runs L.A.B. Golf, has taken on Graham Averill's midlife golf transformation as a coaching project. Averill, a writer turning 50, is chronicling his year-long attempt to reach scratch handicap through MyGolfSpy's Scratch by 50 series. Eight weeks in, he has dropped exactly one stroke. The content is honest, self-deprecating, and readable. It is also a masterclass in brand positioning for a company that makes lie-angle-balanced putters most golfers have never heard of.
L.A.B. Golf currently sits at 53rd globally in brand visibility, down over 33 percent from the previous month. The company does not have Tour-winner headlines or mainstream retail distribution. What it has is a product philosophy that requires explanation and a CEO willing to attach his name to a very public, very slow improvement story. That is not a weakness. That is a calculated bet on authenticity over volume.
The Scratch by 50 series reads like a diary, not a testimonial. Averill talks about chunked wedges, pulled drives, and the humiliation of shooting 103 during a swing rebuild. He talks about his three-to-five-foot putting conversion rate being 33 percent. He does not pretend L.A.B. equipment is a magic fix. He credits Hahn's coaching, not the gear. That restraint is rare in equipment-adjacent content, and it builds trust the way paid placements never can.
This approach mirrors what smaller brands have done successfully in other categories. When you cannot outspend the big five, you find a different vector. For L.A.B., that vector is credibility through transparency. The CEO teaching a struggling mid-handicapper how to compress irons and stop three-putting is not scalable. But it does not need to be. It needs to reach the right golfers, the ones who will pay attention to a putter brand that thinks differently and markets differently.
The risk is that Averill never gets close to scratch, and the series becomes a document of stagnation. The reward is that L.A.B. Golf becomes synonymous with a particular kind of golfer: curious, improvement-obsessed, skeptical of mainstream marketing. That is a small audience, but it is a loyal one. And for a brand ranked outside the top 50, loyalty might be worth more than reach.
