A Star Ascending

Filed in archive Golf Equipment on October 27, 2007

Courtesy: Vega Golf

"I happen to be the descendant of a Samurai knight. And here, there is an interesting story".

So starts a Letter of Introduction from the president of Vega Golf, Akira Mochizuki, on his company's website. And an interesting story, it is.

If you live in the United States or, frankly, anywhere outside Europe and Scandinavia, you may never have heard of Vega golf clubs.

"About 100 years ago the first golf course in Japan was built in Kobe. At that time there was no golf club production in Japan but coincidentally it was the area around Kobe which was famous for metal work, especially the forging of Samurai swords, a highly skilled traditional craft. These sword making skills have been passed down through generations of my family. It was not long before it was realized that these same forging techniques could be readily adapted to create another precision instrument, the golf club. When one of these expert craftsmen returned from Kobe to his home town of Ichikawa the manufacture of the finest quality golf clubs was established here and Vega was born", Mochizuki goes on.

Vega is not about competing with the likes of TaylorMade, Wilson, Titleist and the others. In fact, there are no dealers at present in the United States. If you want to get hold of Vega clubs, you will have to fly to the U.K. where, for some reason, Vega Golf has almost half a dozen distributors.

But you will pay brutally in British pounds for clubs that are already expensive enough. A set of RAF-CM Raw irons will set you back nearly $3500.

These are handcrafted and hand-made golf clubs and they ain't cheap. So bespoke are the company's products that, after 50 years of production (and centuries of Samurai sword making running through the family tree), Vega is still a relative unknown in the golf world, a kind of yet-to-be-discovered planet three solar systems removed from our own.

Vega makes both bladed irons and cavity-backs. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, Vega has produced a limited edition set of each style. And I mean "limited". 25 sets of blades; 25 sets of cavity backs in the entire world. That's it.

In a recent interview with the wild and wacky Golf Punk magazine, Mochizuki said that Vega was only interested in making golf clubs for Japanese tour players but U.S. and European players kept hearing about these Vega hand-made irons and wanted some, as well.

So the company "expanded".

The american golf community got their first look at Vega's products at the 2007 PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando and, of course, the Vega clubs are now on everyone's must-have list.

That will pose an interesting dilemma for Mr. Mochizuki; does he grow rapidly to meet the market demand and risk that hand-made quality or does he remain small and highly exclusive, take his time and continue to produce Vega irons one at a time?

If Vega starts taking out full-page ads in Golf Digest magazine, then we'll have our answer.