Sugarloaf Social Club runs the widest price range in independent golf and holds a single point of view across all of it. The catalogue reaches from a MacKenzie sailcloth bag at $1,400 down to a paper fan at $14, and both read as the same company. It started as a group chat. A few college roommates were graduating in 2011 and wanted somewhere to keep talking about golf, so they named the thread after the course they had spent four years on. The chat became an annual trip, and the trip became an Instagram account that at one point had more followers than Golf Digest. Ian Gilley filed the LLC in 2017 and has described the sequence as “a happy little accident.”
The course they named it after is dead. Sugarloaf Mountain in Minneola, Florida was Coore & Crenshaw's first design in the state, built in 2008 across more than 250 feet of elevation, and it opened directly into the financial crisis. It never recovered and it is permanently closed. A brand named after a course you can no longer play is an on-the-nose metaphor for how golf nostalgia works, and to their credit SSC has never leaned on it.
Sugarloaf is a subsidiary of Pro Shop, Inc., the media company founded by Full Swing producer Chad Mumm and Joe Purzycki, which raised around $20 million from the PGA Tour and Powerhouse Capital and also owns Skratch and GolfWRX. Skratch discloses this in its own coverage. It explains how an independent-looking brand from McLean, Virginia ends up with an officially licensed THE PLAYERS capsule in the navy, gold and white it drew up for TPC Sawgrass.
The catalogue reads as thirty-three projects. MacKenzie bags built from retired sailcloth sit next to a $14 paper fan printed for a Japanese golf media brand, a teal-striped soccer kit made for a coffee bar, and a Western Golf Association line supporting the Evans Scholars program. Most of it has sold out.
Ian Gilley. He is the founder and CEO, and the brand is based in McLean, Virginia.
As a group chat in 2011 between college roommates who had just graduated. It became an annual golf trip, then an Instagram account, then a brand. The LLC was filed in 2017. Gilley has described the whole thing as “a happy little accident.”
Sugarloaf Mountain Golf & Town Club in Minneola, Florida, the college hangout. It was Coore & Crenshaw's first Florida design, built in 2008 with more than 250 feet of elevation change, and it opened into the financial crisis. The course is permanently closed.
Sugarloaf Social Club is a subsidiary of Pro Shop, Inc., the golf media company founded by Chad Mumm and Joe Purzycki that raised roughly $20 million from the PGA Tour and Powerhouse Capital. Pro Shop also owns Skratch and GolfWRX. Skratch discloses the shared ownership in its own coverage of the brand.
The SSC x MacKenzie Sail Bags, built from retired sailcloth and numbered for the sail each one came from. They sold at $975. The white leather Double Seve at $1,400 is the most expensive piece the brand has released.
A line made with the Western Golf Association supporting the Evans Scholars program, which sends caddies to college on full tuition and housing scholarships.
Most of the collaboration work is. Of the thirty-three projects catalogued here, the majority are sold out. The current in-house range — the Terry run, the Tour Towel, headwear — restocks more reliably.
The SSC x Clubhaus Sensu Fan at $14, a folding paper fan printed with the Clubhaus mark.
