Ryan Atha grew up playing golf in Edinburgh and North Berwick but drifted away from the game while at university and during the early years of his career. Upon picking it up again in his mid-20s he was “struck” by the cost and complicated process of buying golf clubs, and the idea for Caley Golf was born.
The company’s small team includes two club builders at Caley’s workshop in Dirleton, just outside North Berwick, with the clubs sourced from Guanlan, a major hub for China’s golf industry. With its range of irons generating revenues in “the mid-seven-figures range”, Caley is now in the process of expanding its product range.
(Image: Damian Shields)
What tipped you into starting your own golf brand in an expensive industry dominated by major players?
To be honest, if it wasn’t golf clubs, it would have been something else. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and start my own brand. I come from a family of marketers, and my grandad was an entrepreneur himself and a big inspiration to me.
I’d already tried to start other businesses and brands – a meal-fulfilment company, a watch company. But golf was something I had a real interest in. There’s that old saying that you should only start a business in something you’re genuinely interested in and knowledgeable about, and I think that’s true.
I was working in digital marketing and e‑commerce, listening to a lot of podcasts. There was an episode with a guy running a [direct to consumer] golf brand in the States, and he was doing really well with it. I thought, “If this guy can do it, why can’t I?”
How has your experience shaped the kind of company you want to build?
I think the pricing model of the big brands – prices going up and up every year – is a problem. In a cost-of-living crisis, that’s also a business opportunity, which is a big part of Caley’s model.
But beyond that, I think it’s just the right thing to do: offer good quality clubs at an affordable price, with the hope we can get more people playing this great game. So that accessibility side is really important to us – not just price, but how we present ourselves and simplify the buying process.
How hands-on are you in the design of the clubs?
To be honest, we’re not hugely involved in the deep technical R&D, and we don’t pretend to be. We lean on our manufacturer, who has decades of experience working with the bigger brands. They do most of the heavy lifting.
We give them a sense of what we’re specifically looking for, often inspired by what the bigger brands are doing. That’s common in golf and in other industries: one brand creates something that works in the market and others piggyback off it.
That’s one area where we can cut costs. We take inspiration from what the bigger brands are doing – they spend millions on R&D – and we try to replicate it, cutting costs in some areas of the technology, but more or less creating a similar product that’s on a par in terms of performance.
How else do you achieve such a substantial discount to premium brands?
The main thing is not paying pros. The tried and tested model for the big brands involves huge marketing expenses – paying professionals to play their clubs, expensive TV advertising. We cut all of that.
Ryan Atha grew up playing golf in Edinburgh and North Berwick (Image: Supplied)
By selling directly to the consumer, we’re also not paying a middleman. We’re not paying American Golf or another retailer to sell our clubs, we’re dealing directly with the customer.
Wherever we can, we cut unnecessary costs. We don’t have a fancy office. We’re pretty frugal with our money and spend it on what matters most – building good-quality golf clubs, assembled by our master club builder in our warehouse, who has great attention to detail and builds a really high‑quality product.
So what’s next for Caley Golf?
With tariffs being lowered again, we’ve started to sell in the US and have started to run ads again. A big goal for 2026 is to expand properly into the US market.
Another big thing for us is expanding our product line. At the moment we’re really focused on our iron sets – two models of hollow‑body irons, the 01 and 02 models. We have a line of woods – driver, fairway woods, hybrids – in prototype phase, and we want to start doing putters again.
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