The golf industry is teeing up in Evansville. Around seven million individual golf equipment products — balls, clubs, bags, gloves, apparel, and more worth about $80 million — are in stock at the 300,000-square-foot TaylorMade Golf North America Distribution Center on Garrison Avenue, waiting to ship out to customers. In fact, every U.S., Canadian, or Mexican order of TaylorMade Golf Co. and Tiger Woods’ Sun Day Red products travels through the facility.
“We’ve grown tremendously year over year, ” says Jessica Delgado, TaylorMade’s associate director of PMO and North America operations. “We hope expansion is in our sight because that means we’re doing the right things.”
Founded in 1979 in McHenry, Illinois, by salesman Gary Adams, the company — currently based in Carlsbad, California — had a distribution center for golf bags in Henderson, Kentucky, from 2005 to 2017, when it decided to consolidate operations in Evansville. The River City’s centralized location sealed the deal for quickly and economically shipping products across the North American continent. Wholesale customers — which represent 60-65 percent of the company’s sales — include Dick’s Sporting Goods, Amazon, and Walmart. Many of the products are assembled overseas, except for the golf balls, which are manufactured at a TaylorMade plant in Liberty, South Carolina.
“Every day, we’ll be receiving inbound trucks, which could be anywhere from three to 15 trucks a day,” says Patrick Schmidt, TaylorMade’s director of North American fulfillment. Quick turnaround is key: “We can get to 82 percent of our customers in three days,” Delgado adds.
After moving operations to Evansville, the distribution center was shipping 14.5 million products per year by 2022. Today, 17.5 million products ship annually.
The distribution center handles 5,000 products through TaylorMade, and a section of Warehouse 1 is dedicated to 3,000 items for Sun Day Red, which Woods established in 2024 after splitting with Nike. More than 300 employees fulfill store and online orders and customize products, from sewing pockets onto bags to giving clubs a personal touch. “Whether it’s your name or your face on a golf ball to a laser-etching machine that is engraving on golf clubs, I like being a part of the new things that we’re coming up with,” Delgado says.
The most frequently ordered items are balls, but the real moneymakers are clubs — price points can top $1,000 — which advance every year through new design technology. The most popular clubs coming through TaylorMade’s warehouse include the P.790 Irons, MG5 Wedge, Spider ZT and Spider Tour X L-Neck putters — the latter is in No. 1 world ranked golfer Scott Scheffler’s tour bag — and Qi35 Max Fairway.
When the company recently needed to move inventory, it hosted a two-day public warehouse sale in July, drawing hundreds of shoppers and showcasing the distribution center’s might. TaylorMade donated the remaining stock to area high school and college golf teams.
“The brand is cool. I think the trajectory that we’re on is how we’re going to support the growth,” Schmidt says. “That’s what’s exciting to me, where we’re gonna be in a few years.”
Did You Know?
TaylorMade’s NAM Distribution Center features Bob — named so because he resembles a minion from the animated film “Despicable Me” — a Pearson Packaging Systems-built random robotic case erector that assembles cardboard boxes for distribution.
