Honma

It started as a driving range. The Honma brothers opened Tsurumi Golf Center in Yokohama in 1959 and were making clubs there within a few years, incorporating that side of the business in 1963 and moving production north to Sakata, in Yamagata Prefecture, in 1981, where it hasn't moved since. Roughly three hundred and sixty craftsmen work in there. Shafts are made on site too, carbon fabric hand-wound around an iron core, then heat treated and ground, which is something almost no club company still does for itself.

Beres is the top line and the one that wears the gold, graded from two to five stars, though those stars describe the ARMRQ shaft and the precious metal in the ferrule rather than anything about the head. T//World is the tour line, on Vizard shafts, and BeZeal and GS sit beneath it. Aizu editions bring a sixteenth century Fukushima lacquer craft onto the club, and a run of collaboration sets with Bugatti says a good deal about where the company places itself. Corporate history here is less tidy than workshop history: the original company went through civil rehabilitation in 2005, and what trades today is Honma Golf Limited, listed in Hong Kong, with offices in Tokyo and Shanghai, a Carlsbad, California office for the American market, and every club still built at Sakata.