Tyler "Sully" Sullivan was so excited when the new golf club heads he'd developed arrived from the manufacturer in April 2013 that he glued one onto a shaft with a 24-hour epoxy and could barely sleep before taking it to the driving range the next day. With his first swing, he crushed the ball 300 yards and dead straight. He thought it was just a lucky hit, but as he worked through a bucket of golf balls, his sweet shots caught the attention of the man two stalls down. Sullivan let him try out the club.
"He took a swing, then another, and didn't say anything," Sullivan recalls. "Then he looked at me, puzzled, and said, 'How is this possible? I just hit it past my brand-new TaylorMade, and it feels better.'"
The next morning, that man made the first purchase of BombTech Golf's Grenade Driver. And that's when Sullivan, a former high-school golfer who lost his job at an engineering company last November, knew his new venture had a chance.
Bombtech Golf's Grenade Driver
Image credit: BombTech Golf
While it's not uncommon for entrepreneurs to bring to market gadgets they've developed in their garages, Sullivan's quest to redesign the golf driver is particularly quixotic. Golf equipment manufacturing is a multibillion-dollar industry--dominated by Nike, TaylorMade and Callaway--that employs aerospace engineers and spends millions on R&D. But Sullivan's personal frustration with drivers compelled him to attempt a change on a smaller level.
"In golf today, the engineering is based on marketing," he says. "It's very trendy. For example, now it's popular to carry a little wrench to manually adjust your driver. We wanted to make something based on pure engineering."
In 2012, Sullivan took his idea for a new driver to the engineering department at the University of Vermont, just eight miles from his home in South Burlington. Over the next year, the four students who elected to team with Sullivan as their capstone project worked and reworked designs until they came up with something they believed superior to existing models.
BombTech's Tyler Sullivan
Image credit: BombTech Golf
The final product became the Grenade Driver. It's made using a two-piece (rather than the typical four-piece) production process, to improve energy transfer. Special divots on the bottom increase head speed. The team shied away from making the club adjustable, instead settling on a standard 10.5-degree loft. The result, Sullivan says, is a club that, for average players, is much more forgiving but hits straighter and farther than similar models.
But building a better club is only half the story. Because manufacturing costs are so high, and because Sullivan wants to keep BombTech's offerings affordable (the Grenade Driver retails for $299), he still does the assembling, shipping and marketing of the lime-green club all by himself. And he sells direct to consumers only through his website in order to avoid high retail markups and maintain personalized customer service.