Our daughter was two when she started stealing my putter.
She would find it leaning against the garage wall, drag it into the yard, and swing at anything that looked like a ball. It was the first time either of us had seen her interested in something we loved, and we wanted to get her one of her own.
That turned out to be much harder than it should have been.
Everything we found fell into one of two categories. The first was plastic. Bright colors, hollow shafts, light enough to blow over in a breeze. Fun for ten minutes on a living room carpet and useless on grass. The second was labeled junior, which sounds right until you read the sizing and realize junior usually means ages five through eight. The shortest putter we could find was twenty-seven inches. Our daughter was thirty-three inches tall. Handing her that club meant she had to stand straight up and grip halfway down the shaft just to reach the ball.
So we did what a lot of golf parents do. We tried to build one ourselves.
We cut down an old putter, wrapped the shaft in layers of grip tape, added a junior grip, and tried to balance the head with lead weights. It was heavy, it was ugly, and the weighting was wrong. But she loved it, and watching her use it told us something important: the problem was not that toddlers cannot play golf. The problem was that nobody was making equipment that fit them.
We are Justin and Kyleigh Locke, and we run Drake & Birdie Golf Co. out of Grand Haven, Michigan.
Justin has spent his career in product and sales on the manufacturing side, which turned out to be unexpectedly useful when the job became sourcing shafts, specifying grip diameters, and arguing about swing weights with factories. Kyleigh keeps the whole thing honest, and the question she asks about every product is the same one that started the company: would our own kid actually use this?
Our daughter is the reason the company exists and also our most demanding product tester. Drake is her middle name. Birdie is for the small wins that make children fall in love with a game, long before they understand what a score is.
We build this at night and on weekends. Justin and Kyleigh still work full-time jobs. Every order that has ever shipped has come through our house first.
Every Drake & Birdie product is built to the dimensions of real children between thirty and forty five inches tall, which is roughly ages two through five. Not scaled down from adult clubs. Not a toy with a golf shape.
That means stainless steel club heads, graphite shafts, junior pistol grips sized for hands that are still learning what a grip is, and real weighting so a child feels the ball come off the face. It is the same material list an adult club uses, built to a different set of measurements.
The putter came first. Twenty one and a half inches, milled face, stainless steel head. It is still our best seller and it is still the club we recommend to almost every family starting out, because putting is the part of golf a toddler can succeed at immediately, and success is what makes them ask to go again. See the toddler putter.
The bag came next, because our customers asked for it. After the putter launched, the most common message we received was some version of "do you make a bag?" We did not understand it at first. A bag felt like an accessory. Then we watched our daughter hand her putter back so she could pick up a stick, and realized that kids do not stay engaged with equipment they are not responsible for. Our stand bag weighs two point one pounds, has a real auto deploy stand that works at toddler height, and dual padded straps instead of one. It changed how she plays more than the putter did. See the toddler golf bags.
The complete set is the one everyone has been waiting for. A twenty six and a half inch driver, a twenty five inch seven iron, and our putter. Real steel heads, graphite shafts, sized for the same thirty to forty five inch range. It took a year of prototyping and one delayed shipment that we chose to wait out rather than compromise on. See the toddler golf clubs.
There are gloves, towels, and ball markers too, because the small stuff is what makes a four year old feel like a real member of the group. See the accessories.
Comparable toddler stand bags run ninety eight to one hundred fifty nine dollars. Ours is fifty nine ninety nine. Comparable complete sets run one hundred thirty nine to one hundred ninety nine dollars. Ours is one hundred nineteen ninety nine.
That is a deliberate choice. We price these as parents buying a gift, not as a brand chasing a margin, because we remember exactly how it felt to look at a two hundred dollar set for a three year old who might lose interest by August.
More than forty-five families have left us five-star reviews, and they almost all say some version of the same thing, which is that it actually fits.
One customer wrote that her son in law works for a major golf brand and was surprised by the quality. Another said it looks like a full size putter that happens to fit a little kid. A grandmother told us her granddaughter was so excited to look like mom and dad on the course that the putter became the talk of Christmas.
Those messages are the actual scoreboard for us. We are not trying to build the biggest junior golf company. We are trying to build the one that gets the two-to-five range right.
New bag colors arrive this fall: lilac, blush pink, and hunter green, joining black and pink. The complete club set ships in October. After that, we are listening to the same place we always have, which is the messages our customers send us.
That is the entire product strategy, honestly. Build gear that fits so well the kid forgets it is there and just plays.
Who knows, as our daughter crosses 45 inches tall, maybe we expand and work on a different age group.
We answer our own email. If you are not sure what size your child needs, or whether they are ready, write to us at info@drakeandbirdiegolf.com and we will tell you honestly, even if the answer is that you should wait a year or buy something we do not sell.
Drake & Birdie Golf Co.
Grand Haven, Michigan
Family-owned and bootstrapped. No outside investment.
Free thirty-day returns on everything we make.
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