If you make something and you have found your way here, it is probably because you searched your own brand name and this site came up. That happens a fair amount now, and for a long time there was nothing on the other end of it. This page is the other end of it.
The Grassy Issue is a golf publication run out of Austin, Texas. It covers the municipal scene here and the independent side of golf apparel and equipment everywhere else. The Brand Index currently runs to 131 brands and roughly 200 thousand words of coverage written about them. More on who is behind it is on the About page.
People who walk. The audience skews toward golfers who care what a thing is made of and where it came from, who play municipal courses more often than private ones, and who are as likely to be looking at a headcover from a two-person studio as at anything with a tour logo on it. There is a heavy Austin concentration and a long tail everywhere else.
If you want numbers before a conversation, ask and you will get them. They are not printed here because a figure on a page goes stale the week after it is written.
Sending product. The simplest one and usually the best. Gear gets shot in Austin, on real courses, in the weather it was built for. Seeded product does not buy coverage, but it does mean the photography is ours rather than a lookbook frame everybody else is running.
Sponsored Field Notes. A piece of reporting a brand underwrites — a course, a trip, an event, a making-of. The brand pays for the work to exist. The brand does not approve the copy. Anything sponsored is labelled as sponsored, on the page, where a reader sees it before they read it.
Newsletter and social placements. Straightforward, clearly marked.
Longer partnerships. A season, a capsule, a recurring slot. These work best when there is an actual editorial reason for them, so they tend to start as a conversation about the work rather than about a placement.
Placement in a roundup. Every brand in an Edit is there because it earned the slot. No exceptions, and no paid entries mixed in with chosen ones.
Approval over what gets written. Facts get checked with you gladly — prices, materials, founding dates, spellings. Opinions do not.
Display advertising. There are no banners here and there is not going to be a banner slot.
Links to somebody else's promotion. Sweepstakes, giveaways, affiliate round-ups for gear nobody here has looked at — these send a reader away from the site for nothing and they are not something TGI carries.
Coverage of one brand at another's expense. Comparisons stay on the facts. Nobody pays to have a competitor described badly.
None of that is posturing about purity. It is the reason the brand pages rank: they read as reporting, so people trust them, so Google surfaces them, so you ended up here.
Email is best, and it reaches one person rather than an inbox: L4harrington@gmail.com.
Useful things to put in a first email: what you make, what you are trying to do, and roughly when. If there is already coverage of you on the site, a link to it saves a step. If there is not, that is fine too — a good part of the Index started with somebody sending a note.
— Lenny Harrington
Austin, Texas